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amcrtcan ^tattmtn 



EDITED BY 



JOHN T. MORSE, JR. 



3tmcritan d&tatc^iiint 



JAMES MADISON 



BT 



SYDNEY HOWARD GAY 




BOSTON 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

New York : 11 East Seventeenth Street 
1889 



El ^\^ 



Copyright, 1884, 
Bt SYDNEY HOWARD GAY. 

All rights reserved. 

ftp--- 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge : 
Electrotyped and Printed by II. 0. Houghton & Co. 



CONTENTS. 

¥-^ 

CHAPTER I. 

Faqb 

The Virginia Madisons 1 

CHAPTER II. 
The Young Statesman 16 

CHAPTER ni. 
In Congress 29 

CHAPTER IV. 
In the State Assembly 47 

CHAPTER V. 
In the Virginia Legislature 64 

CHAPTER VI. 
Public Disturbances and Anxieties .... 76 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Constitutional Convention 88 

CHAPTER VIII. 
"The Compromises" . 98 

CHAPTER IX. 
Adoption of the Constitution 115 



VI CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER X. 
The First Congress 128 

CHAPTER XL 
National Finances. — Slavery 151 

CHAPTER XII. 
Federalists and Repcblicans 172 

CHAPTER XIII. 
French Politics 193 

CHAPTER XIV. 
His Latest Years in Congress 216 

CHAPTER XV. 
At Home. — " Resolutions of '98 and '99 " . . . 234 

CHAPTER XVI. 
Secretary of State 252 

CHAPTER XVIL 
The Embargo 264 

CHAPTER XVin. 
Madison as President 283 

CHAPTER XIX. 
"War with England 301 

CHAPTER XX. 
Conclusion 321 

INDEX 339 



JAMES MADISON. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE YIRGINIA MADISONS. 

Jai^ies Madison was born on March 16, 1751, 
at Port Conway, Vii'ginia ; he died at Montpelher, 
in that State, on June 28, 1836. Mr. John 
Quincy Adams, recalling, perhaps, the death of 
his own father and of Jefferson on the same 
Fourth of July, and that of Monroe on a subse- 
quent anniversary of that day, may possibly have 
seen a generous propriety in finding some equally 
appropriate commemoration for the death of an- 
other Virginian President. For it was quite pos- 
sible that Virginia might think him capable of an 
attempt to conceal, what to her mind would seem 
to be an obvious intention of Providence : that all 
the children of the " Mother of Presidents " should 
be no less distinguished in their deaths than in 
their lives — that the " other dynasty," which 
John Randolph was wont to talk about, should 
no longer pretend to an equality with them, not 



2 JAMES MADISON, 

merely in this world, but in the manner of going 
out of it. At any rate, he notes the date of Mad- 
ison's death, the twenty-eighth day of June, as 
" the anniversary of the day on which the ratifi- 
cation of the Convention of Virginia in 1788 had 
affixed the seal of James Madison as the father 
of the Constitution of the United States, when 
his earthly part sank without a struggle into the 
grave, and a spirit, bright as the seraphim that 
surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to 
the bosom of his God." There can be no doubt of 
the deep sincerity of this tribute, whatever ques- 
tion there may be of its grammatical construction 
and its rhetoric, and although the date is errone- 
ous. The ratification of the Constitution of the 
United States by the Virginia Convention was on 
June 25, not on June 28. It is the misfortune of 
our time that we have no living great men held in 
such universal veneration that their dying on com- 
mon days like common mortals seems quite impos- 
sible. Half a century ago, however, the propriety 
of such providential arrangements appears to have 
been recognized almost as one of the *' institu- 
tions." It was the newspaper gossip of that time 
that a *' distinguished physician " declared that he 
would have kept a fourth ex-President alive to 
die on a Fourth of July, had the illustrious sick 
man been under his treatment. The patient him- 
self, had he been consulted, might, in that case, 
possibly have declined to have a fatal illness pro- 



THE VIRGINIA MADIS0N8. 3 

longed a week to gratify the public fondness for 
patriotic coincidence. But Mr. Adams's appropri- 
ation of another anniversary answered all the pur- 
pose, for that he made a mistake as to the date 
does not seem to have been discovered. 

It was accidental that Port Conway was the 
birthplace of Madison. His maternal grandfather, 
whose name was Conway, had a plantation at 
that place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to 
be there on a visit to her mother when her first 
child, James, was born. In the stately — not to 
say, stilted — biography of him by William C. 
Hives, the christened name of this lady is given as 
Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in 
accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother 
of so distinguished a son should have been bur- 
dened with so commonplace and homely a name 
as Nelly. But we are afraid it is true that Nelly 
was her name. No other biographer than Mr. 
Rives, that we know of, calls her Eleanor. Even 
Madison himself permits " Nelly " to pass under 
bis eyes and from his hands as his mother's name. 

In 1833-34 there was some correspondence be- 
tween him and Lyman C. Draper, the historian, 
which includes some notes upon the Madison 
genealogy. These, the ex-President writes, were 
*Mnade out by a member of the family," and they 
may be considered, therefore, as having his sanc- 
tion. The first record is that " James Madison 
was the son of James Madison and Nelly Con. 



4 JAMES MADISON. 

way." On such authority Nelly, and not Eleanor, 
must be accepted as the mother's name. This, of 
course, is to be regretted from the Rives point of 
view ; but perhaps the name had a less familiar 
sound a century and a half ago; and no doubt 
it was chosen by her parents without a thought 
that their daughter might go into history as the 
mother of a President, or that any higher fortune 
could befall her than to be the respectable head 
of a tobacco-planter's family on the banks of the 
Rappahannock. 

This genealogical record further says that " his 
[Madison's] ancestors, on both sides, were not 
among the most wealthy of the country, but in 
independent and comfortable circumstances." If 
this comment was added at the ex-President's own 
dictation it was quite in accordance with his un- 
pretentious character.^ One might venture to say 

1 Dr. Draper has kindly put into our hands the correspondence 
between himself and Mr. Madison, and we copy these genealog- 
ical notes in full, with the letter in which they were sent, as all 
that the ex-President had to say about his ancestry : — 

•' MOXTPELLIER, February 1, 1834. 
"Dear Sir, — I have received your letter of December 31st, 
and inclose a sketch on the subject of it, made out by a member 
of the family. With friendly respects, 

"James Madison." 

"James Madison was the son of James Madison and Nelly 
Conway. He was born on the 5th of March, 1751 (0. S.), at 
Port Conway, on the Rappahannock River, where she was at the 
time on a visit to her mother residfng there. 

" His father was the son of Ambrose Madison and Frances 



THE VIRGINIA MADISONS. 6 

as much of a Northern or a Western farmer. But 
they did not farm in Virginia ; they phinted. Mr. 
Rives says that the elder James was " a large 
landed proprietor ; " and he adds, " a large landed 
estate in Virginia . . . was a mimic common " 
wealth, with its foreign and domestic relations, 
and its regular administrative hierarchy." The 
" foreign relations " were the shipping, once a 
year, a few hogsheads of tobacco to a London fac- 
tor ; the " mimic commonwealths" were clusters 
of negro-huts, and the " administrative hierarchy " 
was the priest who was more at home at the tav- 
ern or a horse-race than in the discharge of his 
clerical duties. 

As Mr. Madison had only to say of his immedi- 
ate ancestors, — which seems to be all he knew 
about them, — that they were in " independent 
and comfortable circumstances," so he was, ap- 

Taylor. His mother was the daughter of Francis Conway and 
Rebecca Catlett. 

" His paternal grandfather was the son of John Madison and 
Isabella Minor Todd. His paternal grandmother, the daughter 
of James Taylor and Martha Thompson. 

" His maternal grandfather was the son of Edwin Conway and 
Elizabeth Thornton. His maternal grandmother, the daughter 
of John Catlett and Gaines. 

"His father was a planter, and dwelt on the estate now called 
Montpellier where he died February 27, 1801, in the 78th year of 
his age. His mother died at the same place in 1829, February 
11th, in the 98th year of her age. 

" His grandfathers were also planters. It appears that his an- 
cestors, on both sides, were not among the most wealthy of the 
coimtry, but in independent and comfortable circumstances." 



6 JAMES 3IADIS0N. 

parently, as little inclined to talk about himself ; 
even at that age when it is supposed that men who 
have enjoyed celebrity find their own lives the 
most agreeable of subjects. In answer to Dr. 
Draper's inquiries he wrote this modest 1-etter, 
now for the first time published: — 

"Mo>'TPELLiER, August 9, 1833. 

" Dear Sir, — Since your letter of the 3d of June 
came to hand, my increasing age and continued mala- 
dies, with the many attentions due from me, had caused 
a delay in acknowledging it, for which these circum- 
stances must be an apology, in your case, as I have 
been obliged to make them in others. 

" You wish me to refer you to sources of printed in- 
formation on my career in life, and it would afford me 
pleasure to do so ; but my recollection on the subject is 
very defective. It occurs [to me] that there was a bio- 
graphical volume in an enlarged edition compiled by 
General or Judge Eodgers, of Pennsylvania, and which 
may perhaps have included my name, among others. 
When or where it^was published I cannot say. To this 
reference I can only add generally the newspapers at 
the seat of government and elsewhere during the elec- 
tioneering periods, when I was one of the objects under 
review. I need scarcely remark that a life, which has 
been so much a public life, must of course be traced in 
the public transactions in which it was involved, and 
that the most important of them are to be found in doc- 
uments already in print, or soon to be so. 

" With friendly respects, James Madison. 
" Lyman C. Draper, Lockport, N. Y." 



THE VIRGINIA MADIS0N9. 7 

The genealogical statement, it will be observed, 
does not go farther back than Mr. Madison's 
great-grandfather, John. Mr. Rives supposes that 
this John was the son of another John who, as "the 
pious researches of kindred have ascertained," 
took out a patent for land about 1653, between the 
North and York rivers on the shores of Chesa- 
peake Bay. The same writer further assumes 
that this John was descended from Captain Isaac 
Madison, whose name appears " in a document 
in the State Paper Office at London containing 
a list of the Colonists in 1623." From Sains- 
bury's Calendar ^ we learn something more of this 
Captain Isaac than this mere mention. Under 
date of January 24, 1623, there is this record : 
" Captain Powell, gunner, of James City, is dead ; 
Capt. Nuce (?), Capt. Maddison, Lieut. Craddock's 
brother, and divers more of the chief men re- 
ported dead." But either the report was not alto- 
gether true, or there was another Isaac Maddison ; 
for the name appears among the signatures to a 
letter dated about a month later — February 20 — 
from the Governor, Council, and Assembly of 
Virginia to the King. It is of record, also, that 
four months later still, on June 4, " Capt. Isaad 
and j\Iary Maddison " were before the Governor 

1 Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574-1660, Pre- 
served in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty's Public 
Record Office, edited by W. Noel Sainsbury, Esq., etc. London, 
1860. 



8 JAMES MADISON. 

and Council as witnesses in the case of Greville 
Pooley and Cicely Jordan, between whom there 
was a "supposed contract of marriage," made 
" three or four days after her husband's death." 
But the lively widow, it seems, afterward " con- 
tracted herself to Will Ferrar before the Governor 
and Council, and disavowed the former contract," 
and the case therefore became so complicated that 
the court was " not able to decide so nice a differ- 
ence." What Captain Isaac and Mary Maddison 
knew about the matter the record does not tell 
us ; but the evidence is conclusive that if there 
was but one Isaac Maddison in Virginia in 1623 
he did not die in January of that year. Probably 
there was but one, and he, as Rives assumes, was 
the Captain Madyson of whose "achievement," 
as Rives calls it, there is a brief narrative in John 
Smith's " General History of Virginia." 

Besides the record in Sainsbury's Calendar of 
the rumor of the death of this Isaac in Virginia, 
in January, 1623 ; his signature to a letter to the 
King in February ; and his appearance as a wit- 
ness before the Council in the case of the widow 
Jordan, in June, it appears by Hotten's Lists of 
colonists, taken from the Records in the English 
State Paper Department, that Captain Isacke 
Maddeson and Mary Maddeson were living in 1624 
at West and Sherlow Hundred Island. The next 
year, at the same place, he is on the list of dead ; 
and there is given under the same date "The 



THE VIRGINIA MADISONS. 9 

muster of Mrs. Mary IMaddison, widow, aged 30 
years." Her family consisted of " Katherin Lay- 
den, cbild, aged 7 years," and two servants. 
Katherine, it may be assumed, was the daughter 
of the widow Mary and Captain Isaac, and their 
only child. These " musters," it should be said, 
appear always to have been made with great care, 
and there is therefore hardly a possibility that a 
son, if there were one, was omitted in the numer- 
ation of the widow's family, while the name and 
I age of the little girl, and the names and ages of 
the two servants, the date of their arrival in Vir- 
ginia, and the name of the ship that each came 
I in, are all carefully given. The conclusion is in- 
evitable ; Isaac Maddison left no male descend- 
I ants, and President Madison's earliest ancestor in 
i Virginia, if it was not his great-grandfather John, 
must be looked for somewhere else. 

Mr. Rives knew nothing of these Records. His 
first volume was published before either Sains- 
bury's Calendar or Hotten's Lists; and the re- 
searches, on which he relied, " conducted by a 
I distinguished member of the Historical Society of 
I, Virginia" in the English State Paper Office, 
; were, so far as they related to the Madisons, in- 
f complete and worthless. The family was not, 
apparently, ''coeval with the foundation of the 
Colony," and did not arrive " among the earliest 
of the emigrants in the new world." That dis. 
tinction cannot be claimed for James Madison, 



10 JAMES MADISON. 

nor is there any reason for supposing that he be- 
lieved it could be. He seemed quite content with 
the knowledge that so far back as his great-grand- 
father his ancestors had been respectable people, 
" in independent and comfortable circumstances." 

Of his own generation there were seven chil- 
dren, of whom James was the eldest, and alone 
became of any note, except that the rest were 
reputable and contented people in their stations of 
life. A hundred years ago the Arcadian Vir- 
ginia, for which Governor Berkeley had thanked 
God so devoutly, — when there was not a free 
school nor a press in the province, — had passed 
away. The elder Madison resolved, so Mr. Rives 
tells us, that his children should have advantages 
of education which had not been within his own 
reach, and that they should all enjoy them equally. 
James was sent to a school where he could at 
least begin the studies which should fit him to 
enter college. Of the master of that school we 
know nothing except that he was a Scotchman, 
of the name of Donald Robertson, and that many 
years afterward, when his son was an applicant 
for office to Madison, then Secretary of State, the 
pupil gratefully remembered his old master, and 
indorsed upon the application that "the writer is 
son of Donald Robertson, the learned Teacher in 
King and Queen County, Virginia." 

The preparatory studies for college were fin- 
ished at home under the clergyman of the parish, 



THE VIRGINIA MADISONS. H 

the Rev. Thomas Martin, who was a member of 
Mr. Madison's famil}^, perhaps as a private tutor, 
perhaps as a boarder. It is quite likely that it 
was by the advice of this gentleman — who was 
from New Jersey — that the lad was sent to 
Princeton, instead of to William and Mary Col- 
lege in Virginia. At Princeton, at any rate, he 
entered at the age of eighteen, in 1769; or, to 
borrow Mr. Rives's eloquent statement of the 
fact, " the young Virginian, invested with the 
toga virilis of anticipated manhood, we now see 
launched on that disciplinary career which is to 
form him for the future struggles of life." 

One of his biographers says that he shortened 
his collegiate term by taking in one year the 
studies of the junior and senior years; but that 
he remained another twelve-month at Princeton 
for the sake of acquiring Hebrew. On his return 
home he undertook the instruction of his younger 
brothers and sisters, wliile pursuing his own stud- 
ies. Still another biographer asserts that he be- 
gan immediately to read law; but Rives gives 
some evidence that he devoted himself to theol- 
ogy. This and his giving himself to Hebrew for 
a year point to the ministry as his chosen profes- 
sion. But if we rightly interpret his own words, 
he had little strength or sj^irit for a pursuit -of any 
sort. His first " struggle of life" was apparently 
with ill health, and the career he looked forward 
to was a speedy journey to another world. In a 



12 JAMES MADISON. 

letter to a friend (November, 1772) he writes, " I 
am too dull and infirm now to look out for ex- 
traordinary things in this world, for I think my 
sensations for many montlis have intimated to 
me not to expect a long or healthy life ; though 
it may be better with me after some time ; but I 
hardly dare expect it, and therefore have little 
spirit or elasticity to set about anything that is 
difficult in acquiring, and useless in possessing 
after one has exchanged time for eternity." In 
the same letter he assures his friend that he ap- 
proves of his choice of history and morals as the 
subjects of his winter studies ; but, he adds, " I 
doubt not but you design to season them with a 
little divinity now and then, which, like the phi- 
losopher's stone in the hands of a good man, will 
turn them and every lawful acquirement into the 
nature of itself, and make them more precious 
than fine gold." 

The bent of his mind at this time seems to 
have been decidedly religious. He was a diligent 
student of the Bible, and, Mr. Rives says, " he 
explored the whole history and evidences of 
Christianity on every side, through clouds of wit- 
nesses and champions for and against, from the 
fathers and schoolmen down to the infidel philos- 
ophers of the eighteenth century." So wide a 
range of theological study is remarkable in a 
youth of only two or three and twenty years of 
age ; but, remembering that he was at this time 



THE VIRGINIA MADISONS. 13 

living at home, it is even more remarkable that 
in the house of an ordinary planter in Virginia 
a hundred and twenty years ago could be found a 
library so rich in theology as to admit of study so 
exhaustive. But in Virginia history nothing is 
impossible. 

His studies on this subject, however, whether 
wide or limited, bore good fruit. Religious intol- 
erance was at that time common in his immediate 
neighborhood, and it aroused him to earnest and 
open opposition ; nor did that opposition cease till 
years afterward, when freedom of conscience was 
established by law in Virginia, largely by his la- 
bors and influence. Even in 1774, when all the 
colonies were girding themselves for the coming 
revolutionary conflict, he turned aside from a dis- 
cussion of the momentous question of the hour, in 
a letter to his friend ^ in Philadelphia, and ex- 
claimed with unwonted heat : — 

" But away with politics ! . . . That diabolical, hell- 
conceived principle of persecution rages among some ; 
and, to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish 
their quota of imps for such purposes. There are at 
this time in the adjacent country not less than five or 
six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their 
religious sentiments, which in the main are very ortho- 
dox. I have neither patience to hear, talk, or think of 

1 The letters to a friend, from which Ave have quoted, were 
written to William Bradford, Jr., of Philadelphia, afterward At- 
torney-General in Washington's administration. They are given 
in full in The Writings of James Madison, vol. i. 



14 JAMES MADISON. 

anything relative to this matter ; for I have squabbled 
and scolded, abused and ridiculed so long about it to lit- 
tle purpose that I am without common patience." 

These are stronger terms than the mild-tem- 
pered Madison often indulged in. But he felt 
strongly. Probably he, no more than many 
other wiser and older men, understood what was 
to be the end of the political struggle which was 
getting so earnest ; but evidently in his mind it 
was religious rather than civil liberty which was 
to be guarded. " If the Church of England," he 
says in the same letter, " had been the established 
and general religion in all the Northern colonies, 
as it has been among us here, and uninterrupted 
harmony had prevailed throughout the continent, 
it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might 
and would have been gradually insinuated among 
us." 

He congratulated his friend that they had not 
permitted the tea-ships to break cargo in Philadel- 
phia ; and Boston, he hoped, would " conduct 
matters with as much discretion as they seem to 
do with boldness." These things were interest- 
ing and important ; but " away with politics ! 
Let me address you as a student and philosopher, 
and not as a patriot." Shut off from any contact 
with the stirring incidents of that year in the 
towns of the coast, he lost something of the sense 
of proportion. To a young student, solitary, ill 
in body, perhaps a trifle morbid in mind, a lit- 



THE VIRGINIA MADISONS. 15 

tie discontented that all the learning gained at 
Princeton could find no better use than to save 
schooling for the six youngsters at home, — to him 
it may have seemed that liberty was more seri- 
ously threatened by that outrage, under his own 
eyes, of "five or six well-meaning men in close 
jail for publishing their religious sentiments," 
than by any tax which Parliament could contrive. 
Not that he overestimated the importance of this 
wrong, but that he underestimated the importance 
of that. He was not long, however, in getting 
the true perspective. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 

Madison's place, both from temperament and 
from want of physical vigor, was in the council, ; 
not in the field. One of his early biographers f 
says that he joined a military company, raised in r 
his own county, in preparation for war; but this, ] 
there can hardly be a doubt, is an error. lie 
speaks with enthusiasm of the "high-spirited" 
Yolunteers, who came forward to defend " tlie honor 
and safety of their country ; " but there is no in- 
timation that he chose for himself that way of 
showing his patriotism. But of the Committee of 
Safety, appointed in his county in 1774, he was 
made a member — perhaps the youngest, for he 
was then onl}^ twenty-thi-ee years old. 

Eiirhteen months afterward he was elected a 
delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776, and 
this he calls " my first entrance into public life." 
It gave him also an o^Dportunity for some distinc- 
tion, which, whatever may have been his earlier 
plans, opened public life to him as a career. The 
first work of the convention was to consider and 
adopt a series of resolutions instructing the Vir- 



THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 17 

ginian delegates in the Continental Congress, then 
in session at Philadelphia, to urge an immediate 
declaration of independence. The next matter 
was to frame a Bill of Rights and a Constitution of 
government for the province. Madison was made a 
member of the committee to which this latter sub- 
ject was referred. One question necessarily came 
up for consideration which had for him a peculiar 
interest, and in any discussion of which he, no 
doubt, felt quite at ease. This was concerning re- 
ligious freedom. An article in the proposed Dec- 
laration of Rights provided that " all men should 
enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of re- 
ligion, according to the dictates of conscience, 
unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate, 
unless, under color of religion, any man disturb 
the peace, happiness, or safety of society." It 
does not appear that Mr. Madison offered any 
objection to the article in the committee ; but 
when the report was made to the convention he 
moved an amendment. He pointed out the dis- 
tinction between the recognition of an absolute 
right and the toleration of its exercise ; for toler- 
ation implies the power of jurisdiction. He pro- 
posed, therefore, instead of providing that ''all 
men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the ex- 
ercise of religion," to declare that " all men are 
equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it 
according to the dictates of conscience ; " and that 
"no man or class of men ought, on account of re- 

2 



18 JAMES MADISON. 

ligion, to be invested with peculiar emoluments or 
privileges, nor subjected to any penalties or disa- 
bilities, unless, under color of religion, the preser- 
vation of equal liberty and the existence of the 
State be manifestly endangered." This distinction 
between the assertion of a right and the promise 
to grant a privilege only needed to be pointed out. 
But Mr. Madison evidently meant more ; he meant 
not only that religious freedom should be assured, 
but that an Established (yhurch, which, as we have 
already seen, he believed to be dangerous to lib- 
erty, should be prohibited. Possibly the conven- 
tion was not quite ready for this latter step ; or 
possibly its members thought that, as the greater 
includes the less, should freedom of conscience be 
established a state church would be impossible, 
and the article might therefore be stripped of super- 
erogation and verbiage. At any rate it was re- 
duced one half, and finally adopted in this simpler 
form : " That religion, or the duty we owe to our 
Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be 
directed only by reason and conviction, not by force 
or violence ; and, therefore, all men are equally 
entitled to the free exercise of religion according 
to the dictates of conscience." Thus it stands to 
this day in the Bill of Rights of Virginia, and of 
other States which subsequently made it their own, 
possessing for us the personal interest of being the 
first public work of tlie coming statesman. 

Madison was thenceforth for the next forty 



THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 19 

years a public man. Of the first Assembly under 
the new Constitution, he was elected a member. 
For the next session also he was a candidate, but 
failed to be returned for a reason as creditable to 
him as it was uncommon then, whatever it may 
be now, in Virginia. '' The sentiments and man- 
ners of the parent nation," Mr. Rives says, still 
prevailed in Virginia, " and the modes of canvass- 
ing for popular votes in that country were gener- 
ally practiced. The people not only tolerated, 
but expected and even required, to be courted and 
treated. No candidate who neglected those atten- 
tions could be elected." But the times, Mr. Mad- 
ison thought, seemed " to favor a more chaste 
mode of conducting elections," and he "deter- 
mined to attempt, by an example, to introduce it." 
He failed signally ; " the sentiments and manners 
of the parent nation" were too much for him. He 
solicited no votes ; nobody got drunk at his ex- 
pense ; and he lost the election. An attempt was 
made to contest the return of his opponent on the 
ground of corrupt influence, but, adds Mr. Rives, 
in his sesquipedalian measure, "for the want of 
adequate proof to sustain the allegations of the 
petition, which in such cases it is extremely diffi- 
cult to obtain with the requisite precision, the pro- 
ceeding was unavailing except as a perpetual pro- 
test upon the legislative records of the country, 
against a dangerous abuse, of which one of her 
sons, so qualified to serve her, and destined to be 



20 JAMES MADISON. 

one of her chief ornaments, was the early though 
temporary victim." Mr. Rives does not mean that 
Mr. Madison was for a little while in early life 
the victim of a vicious habit ; but that he lost 
votes because he would do nothing to encourage it 
in others. 

The country lost a good representative, but 
their loss was his gain. The Assembly immedi- 
ately elected him a member of the governor's 
council, and in this position he so grew in public 
favor that, two years afterward (1780), he was 
chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress. 
He was still under thirty, and bad he been even 
a more brilliant young man than he really was, it 
would not have been to his discredit had he only 
been seen for the next year or two, if seen at all, 
in the background. He had taken his seat among 
men, everj' one of whom, probably, was his senior, 
and among whom were many of the wisest men in 
the country, not " older " merely, but " better sol- 
diers." 

If not the darkest, at least there was no darker 
year in the Revolution than that of 1780. Within 
a few days of his arrival at Philadelphia, Madison 
wrote to Jefferson, — then governor of Virginia, — 
his opinion of the state of the country. It was 
gloomy but not exaggerated. The only bright 
spot he could see was the chance that Clinton's 
expedition to South Carolina might be a failure ; 
but within little more than a month from the date 



THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 21 

of his letter, Lincoln was compelled to surrender 
Charleston, and the whole country south of Vir- 
ginia seemed about to fall into the hands of the 
enemy. Could he have foreseen that calamity, 
his apprehensions might have been changed to 
despair ; for he writes : — 

" Our army threatened with an immediate alternative 
of disbanding or living on free quarter ; the public treas- 
ury empty ; public credit exhausted, nay, the private 
credit of purchasing agents employed, I am told, as far 
as it will bear ; Congress complaining of the extortion 
of the people ; the people of the improvidence of Con- 
gress ; and the army of both ; our affairs requiring the 
most mature and systematic measures, and the urgency 
of occasions admitting only of temporary expedients, 
and these expedients generating new difficulties; Con- 
gress recommending plans to the several States for 
execution, and the States separately rejudging the expe- 
diency of such plans, whereby the same distrust of con- 
current exertions that had damped the ardor of patri- 
otic individuals must produce the same effect among the 
States themselves ; an old system of finance discarded as 
incompetent to our necessities, an untried and precarious 
one substituted, and a total stagnation in prospect be- 
tween the end of the former and the operation of the 
latter. These are the outlines of the picture of our 
public situation. I leave it to your own imagination to 
fill them up." 

He saw more clearly, perhaps, after the ex- 
perience of one session of Congress, the true cause 
of all these troubles ; at any rate he was able, in 



22 JAMES MAD IS 02^. 

II letter written in November of that year (1780), 
to state it tersely and explicitly. The want of 
money, be wrote to a friend, " is the source of all 
our public difficulties and misfortunes. One or 
two millions of guineas properly applied would 
diffuse vigor and satisfaction throughout the whole 
military department, and would expel the enemy 
from every part of the United States." 

But nobody knew better than he the difficulty 
of raising funds except by borrowing abroad, and 
that this was a precarious reliance. There must 
be some sort of substitute for money. In specific 
taxation he had no faith. Such taxes, if paid at 
all, would be paid, virtually, in the paper currency 
or certificates of the States, and these had already 
fallen to the ratio of one hundred to one ; they 
kept on falling till they reached the rate of a 
thousand to one, and then soon became alto- 
gether worthless. When the estimate for the 
coming year was vmder consideration, he proposed 
to Congress that the States should be advised to 
abandon the issue of this paper currency. " It 
met," he says, " with so cool a reception that I 
did not much urge it." The sufficient answer to 
the proposition was, that " the practice was man- 
ifestly repugnant to the Acts of Congress," and as 
these were disregarded and could not be enforced, 
a mere remonstrance would be quite useless. The 
Union was little more than a name under the 
feeble bonds of the Confederation, and each 



THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 23 

State was a law unto itself. Not that in this 
case there was much reasonable ground for com- 
plaint ; for what else could the States do? Where 
there was no money there must be something 
to take its place ; a promise to pay must be ac- 
cepted instead of payment. The paper answered 
a temporary purpose, though it was plain that in 
the end it would be good for nothing. 

The evil, however, was manifestly so great that 
there was only the more reason for trying to mit- 
igate it, if it could not be cured. Madison, like 
the rest, had his remedy. He proposed, in a let- 
ter to one of his colleagues, that the demand for 
army supplies should be duly apportioned among 
the people, their collection rigorously enforced, 
and payment made in interest-bearing certificates, 
not transferable, but to be redeemed at a specified 
time after the war was over. The plan would un- 
doubtedly have put a stop to the circulation of a 
vast volume of paper money if the producers 
would have exchanged the products of their labor 
for certificates, useless at the time of exchange, 
and having only a possible prospective value in 
case of the successful termination of an uncertain 
war. Patriotic as the people were, they neither 
would nor could have submitted to such a law, 
nor had Congress the power to enforce it. But 
Mr. Madison did not venture apparently to urge 
his plan beyond its suggestion to his colleague. 
Why the Assembly of Virginia should have 



24 JAMES MADISON: 

proposed to elect an extra delegate to Congress, 
early in 1781, is not clear, unless it be that one 
of the number, Joseph Jones, being also a mem- 
ber of the Assembly, passed much of his time 
in Richmond. It does not appear, however, that 
the delegate extraordinary tvas ever sent, per- 
haps because it was known to Mr. Madison's 
friends that it would be a mortification to him. 
There was certainly no good reason for any dis- 
trust of either his ability or his industry. One 
could hardly be otherwise than industrious who 
had it in him — if the story be true — to take but 
three hours out of the twentj^-four for sleep during 
the last year of his college course, that he might 
crowd the studies of two years into one. He 
seemed to love work for its own sake, and he was 
a striking example of how much virtue there is in 
steadiness of pursuit. Not that he had at this 
time any special goal for his ambition. His aim 
seemed to be simply to do the best he could where- 
ever he might be placed ; to discharge faithfully, 
and to the best of such ability as he had, whatever 
duty was intrusted to him. His report of the 
proceedings in the Congressional session of 1782- 
83, and the letters written during those years and 
the year before, show that he was not merely dil- 
igent but absorbed in the duties of his office. 

He was more faithful to his constituents than 
his constituents sometimes were to him. Any- 
thing that might happen at that period for want 



THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 25 

of money can hardly be a matter of surprise ; but 
Virginia, even then, should have been able, it 
would seem, to find enough to enable its members 
of Congress to pay their board-bills. He com- 
plains gently in his Addisonian way of the incon- 
venience to which he was put for want of funds. 
" I cannot," he writes to Edmund Randolph, " in 
any way make you more sensible of the importance 
of your kind attention to pecuniary remittances for 
me, than by informing you that I have for some 
time past been a pensioner on the favor of Hayne 
Solomon, a Jew broker." A month later he 
writes, that to draw bills on Virginia has been 
tried, "but in vain;" nobody would buy them; 
and he adds, " I am relapsing fast into distress. 
The case of my brethren is equally alarming." 
Within a week he again writes : " I am almost 
ashamed to reiterate my wants so incessantly to 
you, but they begin to be so urgent that it is im- 
possible to suppress them." But the Good Sa- 
maritan, Solomon, is still an unfailing reliance. 
" The kindness of our little friend in Front Street, 
near the coffee house, is a fund which will pre- 
serve me from extremities ; but I never resort to 
it without great mortification, as he obstinately 
rejects all recompense. The price of money is so 
usurious, that he thinks it ought to be extorted 
from none but those who aim at profitable specu- 
lations. To a necessitous delegate he gratuitously 
spares a supply out of his private stock." It is a 



26 JAMES MADISON. 

pretty picture of the simplicity of the early days 
of the Republic. Between the average modern 
member and the money-broker, under such cir- 
cumstances, there would lurk, probabl}^ a contract 
for carrying the mails or for Indian supplies. 

Relief, however, came at last. An appeal was 
made in a letter to the Governor of Virghiia, 
which was so far public that anybody about the 
executive office might read it. The answer to 
this letter, says Mr. Madison, *' seems to chide our 
urgency." But there soon came a bill for two 
hundred dollars, which, he adds, " very seasonably 
enabled me to replace a loan by which I had an- 
ticipated it. About three hundred and fifty more 
(not less) would redeem me completely from the 
class of debtors." It is to be hoped it came with- 
out further chiding.^ 

The young member was not less attentive to 
his congressional duties because of these little 
difficulties in the personal ways and means. Mil- 
itary movements seem, without altogether escap- 
ing his attention, to have interested him the 
least. In his letters to the public men at home, 
which were meant in some degree to give such 

1 The members of Congress were paid, at that time, by the 
States they represented. Virginia allowed her delegates their 
family expenses, including three servants and four horses, house 
rent and fuel, two dollars a mile for travel, and twenty dollars a 
day when in attendance on Congress. The members were re- 
quired to render an account, quarterly, of their household ex« 
penses, and the State paid them when she had any money. 



THE YOUNG STATESMAN. 27 

information as, in later times, the newspapers sup- 
plied, questions relating to army affairs, even news 
directly from the army, occupy the least space. 
They are not always, for that reason, altogether 
entertaining reading. One would be glad, occa- 
sionally, to exchange their sonorous and rounded 
periods for any expression of quick, impulsive 
feeling. " I return you," he writes to Pendleton, 
" my fervent congratulations on the glorious suc- 
cess of the combined armies at York and Glouces- 
ter. We have had from the Commander-in-Chief 
an ofiicial report of the fact," — and so forth and 
so forth ; and then for a page or more is a discus- 
sion of the condition of British possessions in the 
East Indies, that " rich source of their commerce 
and credit, severed from them, perhaps forever ; " 
of " the predatory conquest of Eustatia," and of 
the " relief of Gibraltar, which was merely a neg- 
ative advantage ; " — all to show that " it seems 
scarcely possible for them much longer to shut 
their ears against the voice of peace." There is 
not a word in all this that is not quite true, perti- 
nent, reflective, and becoming a statesman ; but 
neither is there a word of sympathetic warmth 
and patriotic fervor which at that moment made 
the heart of a whole people beat quicker at the 
news of a great victory, and in the hope that the 
cause was gained at last. 

All the letters have this preternatural solem- 
nity, as if each was a study in style after the 



/ 

/ 28 JAMES MADISON. 

favorite Addisonian model. One wonders if he 
did not, in the privacy of his own room, and with 
the door locked, venture to throw his hat to the 
ceiling and give one hurrah under his breath, at 
the discomfiture of the vain and self-sufficient 
Cornwallis. But he seems never to have been 
a young man. At one and twenty he gravely 
warned his friend Bradford not " to suffer those 
impertinent fops that abound in every city to 
divert you from your business and philosophical 
amusements. . . . You will make them respect 
and admire you more by showing your indigna- 
tion at their follies, and by keeping them at a 
becoming distance." It was his loss, however, 
and our gain. He was one of the men the times 
demanded, and without whom they would have 
been quite different times and followed by quite 
different results. The sombre hue of his life was 
due partly, no doubt, to natural temperament ; 
partly to the want of health in his earlier man- 
hood, which led him to believe that his days were 
numbered; but quite as much, if not more than 
either, to a keen sense of the responsibility resting 
upon those to whom had fallen the conduct of 
public affairs. 



CHAPTER HI. 

IN CONGKESS. 

Madison had grown steadily in the estimation 
of his colleagues, as is shown, especially in 1783, 
by the frequency of his appointment upon impor- 
tant committees. He was a member of that one 
to which was intrusted the question of national 
finances, and it is plain, even in his own modest 
report of the debates of that session, that he took 
an important part in the long discussions of the 
subject, and exercised a marked influence upon 
the result. The position of the government was 
one of extreme difficulty. To tide over an imme- 
diate necessity, a further loan had been asked of 
France in 1782, and bills were drawn against it 
without waiting for acceptance. It was not very 
likely, but it was not impossible, that the bills 
might go to protest ; but even should they be hon- 
ored, so irregular a proceeding was a humiliat- 
ing acknowledgment of poverty and weakness, to 
which some of the delegates, Mr. Madison among 
them, were extremely sensitive. 

The national debt altogether was not less than 
forty million dollars. To provide for the interest 



30 JAMES MADISON. 

on this debt, and a fund for expenses, it was nec- 
essary to raise about three million dollars annu- 
ally. But the sum actually contributed for the 
support of the confederate government in 1782 was 
only half a million dollars. This was not from 
any absolute inability on the part of the people to 
pay more ; for the taxes before the war were more 
than double that sum, and for the first three or 
four years of the war it was computed that, with 
the depreciation of paper money, the people sub- 
mitted to an annual tax of about twenty million 
dollars. The real difficulty lay in the character of 
the Confederation. Congress might contrive but 
it could not command. The States might agree, or 
they might disagree, or any two or more of them 
might only agree to disagree ; and they were more 
likely to do either of the last two than the first. 
There was no power of coercion anywhere. All 
that Congress could do was to try to frame laws 
that would reconcile differences, and bring thir- 
teen supreme governments upon some common 
ground of agreement. To distract and perplex it 
still more, it stood face to face with a well-disci- 
plined and veteran army which might at any mo- 
ment, could it find a leader to its mind, march 
upon Philadelphia and deal with Congress as 
Cromwell dealt with the Long Parliament. There 
were some men, probably, in that body, who would 
not have been sorry to see that precedent fol- 
lowed. Washington might have done it if he 



IN CONGRESS. 31 

would. Gates probably would have done it if he 
could. 

To avert this threatened danger ; to contrive 
taxation that should so far please the taxed that 
they would refrain from ushig the power in their 
hands to escape altogether any taxation for general 
purposes, was the knotty problem this Congress 
had to solve in order to save the Confederacy from 
dissolution. There was no want of plans and ex- 
pedients ; neither were there wanting men in that 
body who clearly understood the conditions of the 
problem, and how it might be solved, and whose 
aim was direct and unfaltering. Chief among 
them were Hamilton, Wilson, Ellsworth, and 
Madison. However wrong-headed, or weak, or in- 
temperate others may have been, these men were 
usually found together on important questions ; 
differing sometimes in details, but unmoved by 
passion or prejudice, and strong from reserved 
force, they overwhelmed their opponents at the 
right moment with irresistible argument and by 
weight of character. 

In the discussion of the more important ques- 
tions Mr. Madison is conspicuous — conspicuous 
without being obtrusive. A reader of the debates 
can hardly fail to be struck with his familiarity 
with English constitutional law, and its applica- 
tion to the necessities of this off-shoot of the Eng- 
lish people in setting up a government for them- 
selves. The stores of knowledge he drew upon 



32 JAMES MADISON. 

must needs have been liiid up in the years of quiet 
study at home before lie entered upon public life. 
For there was no congressional library then where 
a member could '' cram " for debate ; and — though 
Philadelphia already had a fair public library — 
the member who was armed at all points must 
have equipped himself before entering Congress. 
In this respect Madison probably had no equal, 
except Hamilton, and possibly Ellsworth. To 
the need of such a library, however, he and others 
were not insensible. As chairman of a commit- 
tee he reported a list of books " proper for the 
use of Congress," and advised their purchase. 
The report declared that certain authorities upon 
international law, treaties, negotiations, and other 
questions of legislation, were absolutely indispen- 
sable, and that the want of them '' was manifest 
in several Acts of Congress." But the Congress 
was not to be moved by a little thing of that sort. 
The attitude of his own State sometimes em- 
barrassed him in the satisfactory discharge of his 
duty as a legislator. The earliest distinction he 
won after entering Congress was as chairman of a 
committee to enforce upon Mr. Jay, then minister 
to Spain, the instructions to adhere tenaciously to 
the right of navigation on the Mississippi, in his 
negotiations for an alliance with that power. Mr. 
Madison, in his dispatch, maintained the American 
side of the question with a force and clearness to 
which no subsequent discussion of the subject ever 



IN CONGRESS. 33 

added anything. He left nothing unsaid that could 
be said to sustain the right either on the ground of 
expediency, of national comity, or of international 
law ; and his arguments were not only in accord- 
ance with his own convictions, but with the in- 
structions of the Assembly of his own State. It 
was a question of deep interest to Virginia, whose 
western boundary at that time was the Mississippi. 
But Virginia soon afterward shifted her position. 
The course of the war in the Southern States in 
the winter of 1780-81 aroused in Georgia and 
the Carolinas renewed anxiety for an alliance with 
Spain. The fear of their people was, that, in case 
of the necessity for a sudden peace while the 
British troops were in possession of those States 
or parts of them, they might be compelled to re- 
main as British territory under the application of 
the rule of nti possidetis. It was urged, therefore, 
that the right to the Mississippi should be surren- 
dered to Spain, if it were made the condition of 
an alliance. In deference to her neierhbors Vir- 
ginia proposed that Mr. Jay should be reinstructed 
accordingly. 

Mr. Madison was not in the least shaken in his 
conviction. With him, the question was one of 
right rather than of expediency. But not many 
at that time ventured to doubt that representa- 
tives must implicitly obey the instructions of their 
constituents. He yielded; but not till he had ap- 
pealed to the Assembly to reconsider their deci- 



34 JAMES MADISON. 

Bion. The scale was turned ; in deference to the 
wishes of the Southern States new orders were 
sent to Mr. Jay. Mr. Madison, however, had not 
long to wait for his justification. When the imn 
mediate danger, which had so alarmed the South, 
had passed away, Virginia returned to her original 
position. New instructions were again sent to 
her representatives, and Mr. Jay was once more 
advised by Congress, that on the Mississippi ques- 
tion his government would yield nothing. 

On another question, two years afterward, Mr. 
Madison refused to accept a position of inconsist- 
ency in obedience to instructions which his State 
attempted to force upon him. No one saw more 
clearly than he how absolutely necessary to the 
preservation of the Confederacy was the settle- 
ment of its financial affairs on some sound and 
just basis ; and no one labored more earnestly and 
more intelligently than he to bring about such a 
settlement. Congress had proposed in 1781 a tax 
upon imports, each State to appoint its own col- 
lectors but the revenue to be paid over to the 
federal government to meet the expenses of the 
war. Rhode Island alone, at first, refused her 
assent to this scheme. An impost law of five per 
cent, upon certain imports and a specific duty 
upon others for twenty-five j^ears were an essential 
part of the plan of 1783, to provide a revenue to 
meet the interest on the public debt and for other 
general purposes. That Rhode Island would con' 



IN CONGRESS. 35 

tinne obstinate on this point was more than prob- 
able ; and the only hope of moving her was that 
she should be shamed or persuaded into compli- 
ance by the combined influence of all the other 
States. 

Mr. Madison was as bitter as he could ever be 
in his reflections upon that State, whose course, 
he thought, showed a want of any sense of honor 
or of patriotism. Virginia, he argued, should re- 
buke her by making her own compliance with the 
law the more emphatic, as an example for all the 
rest. But Virginia did exactly the other thing. 
At the moment when debate upon the revenue 
law was the most earnest, and the prospect of 
carrying it the most hopeful ; when a committee 
appointed by Congress liad already started on 
their journey northward to expostidate with, and, 
if possible, conciliate Rhode Island ; — at that 
critical moment came news from Virginia that she 
had revoked her assent of a previous session to 
the impost law. This was equivalent to instruct- 
ing her delegates in Congress to oppose any such 
measure. The situation was an awkward one for 
a representative who had put himself among the 
foremost of those who were pushing this policy, 
and who had been making invidious reflections 
npon a State which opposed it. The rule that the 
will of the constituents should govern the repre- 
s^mtative, he now declared, had its exceptions, and 
here was a case in point. He continued to en- 



86 JAMES MADISON. 

force the necessity of a general law to provide a 
revenue, though his arguments were no longer 
pointed with the selfishness and want of patriot- 
ism shown by the people of Rhode Island. In the 
end his firmness was justified by Virginia, who 
again shifted her position when the new act was 
submitted to her. 

The operation of the law was limited to five 
and twenty years. This Hamilton opposed, and 
Madison supported ; and in this difference some 
of the biographers of both see the foreshadowing 
of future parties. But it is more likely that 
neither of those statesmen thought of their differ- 
ence of opinion as difference of principle. The 
question was, whether anything could be gained 
by a deference to that party which, both felt at 
that time, threatened to throw away, in adhering 
to the state-rights doctrine, all that was gained 
by the Revolution. They were agreed upon the 
necessity of a general law, supreme in all the 
States, to meet the obligation of a debt contracted 
for the general good. Unless — wrote Madison in 
February — " unless some amicable and adequate 
arrangements be speedily taken for adjusting all 
the subsisting accounts and discharging the public 
engagements, a dissolution of the Union will be 
inevitable." He was willing, therefore, to tem- 
porize, that the necessary assent of the State to 
such a law might be gained. Nobody hoped that 
the public debt would be paid off in twenty-five 



IN CONGRESS. 37 

years ; but to assume to levy a federal tax in tlie 
States for a longer period, or till the debt should 
be discharged, might so arouse state jealousy that 
it would be impossible to get an assent to the law 
anywhere. If the law for twenty-five years should 
be accepted, the threatened destruction of the 
government would be escaped for the present, and 
it might, at the end of a quarter of a century, 
be easy to reenact the law. At any rate the evil 
day would be put off. This was Madison's rea- 
soning. 

But Hamilton did not believe in putting off a 
crisis. He had no faith in the permanency of the 
government as then organized. If he were right, 
what was the use or the wisdom of postponing 
a catastrophe till to-morrow ? A possible escape 
from it might be even more difficult to-morrow 
than to-day. The essential difference between 
the two men was, that Madison only feared what 
Hamilton positively knew, or thought he knew. 
It was a difference of faith. Madison hoped some- 
thing would turn up in the course of twenty-five 
years. Hamilton did not believe that anything 
good could turn up under the feeble rule of the 
Confederation. He would have presented to the 
States, then and there, the question — would they 
SLirrenderto the Confederate Government the right 
of taxation so long as that goverment thought it 
necessary ? If not, then the Confederation was a 
rope of sand, and the States had resolved them- 



88 JAMES MADISON. 

selves into thirteen separate and independent gov- 
ernments. Therefore he opposed the condition of 
twenty-five years, and voted against the bill. 

Nevertheless, when it became the law, he gave it 
his heartiest support, and was appointed one of a 
committee of three to prepare an address, which 
Madison wrote, to commend it to the acceptance 
of the States. Indeed, the last serious effort made 
on behalf of the measure was made by Hamilton, 
wlio used all his eloquence and influence to in- 
duce the legislature of his o\vn State to ratify it. 
It was the law against his better judgment ; but 
being the law lie did his best to secure its recogni- 
tion. But it failed of hearty supj)ort in most of 
the States, while in New York and Pennsylvania 
compliance with it was absolutely refused. Noth- 
ing, therefore, would have been lost had Hamil- 
ton's firmness prevailed in Congress ; and nothing 
was gained by jNIadison's deference to the doc- 
trine of state-rights, unless it was that the ques- 
tion of a " more perfect Union " \vas put off to 
a more propitious time, when a reconstruction of 
the government under a new Federal Constitution 
was possible. Meanwhile Congress borrowed the 
money to pay the interest on money already bor- 
rowed ; the Confederate Government floundered 
deeper and deeper into inextricable difficulties ; 
the thirteen ships of state drifted farther and far- 
ther apart, with a fair promise of a general wreck. 

But the bill contained another compromise 



IN CONGRESS. 39 

which was not temporary, and once made could 
not be easily unmade. Agreed to now, it became 
a condition of the adoption of the Federal Con- 
stitution four years later; and there, as nobody 
now is so blind as not to see, it was the source of 
infinite mischief for nearly a century, till a third 
reconstruction of the Union was brought about by 
the war of 1861-65. The Articles of Confedera- 
tion required that " all charges of war and all 
otlier expenses that shall be incurred for the com- 
mon defense or general welfare " should be borne 
by the States in proportion to the yalue of their 
lands. It was proposed to amend this provision 
of the Constitution, and for lands substitute popu- 
lation, exclusive of Indians not taxed, as the basis 
for taxation. But here arose at once a new and 
perplexing question. There were, chiefly in one 
portion of the country, about 750,000 '^ persons 
held to service or labor " — the euphuism for ne- 
gro slaves which, evolved from some tender and 
sentimental conscience, came into use at this pe- 
riod. Should these, recognized only as property 
by state law, be counted as 750,000 persons by 
the laws of the United States ?i Or should they, 
in the enumeration of population, be reckoned, in 
accordance with the civil law, as jjto nullis, pro 
mortuis^ pro quadrupedibus ; and therefore not to 
be counted at all? Or should they, as those who 

1 In some of the States slaves were reckoned as "chattels per 
sonal ; " in others as " real estate." 



40 JAMES MADISON. 

owned them insisted, be counted, if included in 
the basis of taxation, as fractions of persons only? 

The South contended that black slaves were 
not equal to white men as producers of wealth, 
and that, by counting them as such, taxation 
would be unequal and unjust. But whether 
counted as units, or as fractions of units, the 
slaveholders insisted that representation should 
be according to that enumeration. The Northern 
reply was that, if representation was to be accord- 
ing to population, the slaves being included, then 
the slave States would have a representation of 
property, for which there would be no equivalent 
in States where there were no slaves ; but, if 
slaves were enumerated as a basis of representa- 
tion, then that enumeration should also be taken 
to fix the rate of taxation. 

Here, at any rate, was a basis for an interesting 
dead-lock. One simple way out of it would have 
been to insist upon the doctrine of the civil law ; 
to count the slaves only as pro quadrupedibus^ to 
be left out of the enumeration of population as 
being no part of the State, as horses and cattle 
were left out. But the bonds of union hung 
loosely upon the sisters a hundred years ago ; 
there was not one of them who did not think she 
was able to set up for herself and take her place 
among the nations as an independent sovereign ; 
and it is more than likely that half of them would 
have refused to wear those bonds any longer on 



IN CONGRESS. 41 

such a condition. There was no apprehension 
then that shivery was to become a power for evil 
in the State ; but there was intense anxiety lest 
the States should fly asunder, form partial and 
local unions among neighbors, or become entan- 
gled in alliances with foreign nations, at the sacri- 
fice of all, or much, that was gained by the Revo- 
lution. To make any concession, therefore, to 
slavery for the sake of the Union was hardly held 
to be a concession. 

The curious student of history, however, who 
loves to study those problems of what might have 
happened, if events that did not happen had come 
to pass, will find ample room for speculation in 
the possibilities of this one. Had there been no 
compromise, it is as easy to see now, as it was 
easy to foresee then, how quickly the feeble bond 
of union would have snapped asunder. But never- 
theless, if the North had insisted that the slaves 
should neither be counted nor represented at all, 
or else should be reckoned in full and taxes levied 
accordingly, the consequent dissolution of the Con- 
federacy might have had consequences which then 
nobody dreamed of. For it is not impossible, it 
is not even improbable, that, in that event, the 
year 1800 w^ould have seen slavery in the process 
of rapid extinction everywhere except in South 
Carolina and Georgia. Had the event been post- 
poned in those States to a later period, it would 
only have been because they had already found in 



42 JAMES MADISON. 

the cultivation of indigo and rice a profitable use 
for slave-labor, which did not exist in the other 
slave States, where the supply of slaves was rap- 
idly exceeding the demand. There can hardly be 
a doubt that in case of the dissolution of the Con- 
federacy, the Northern free-labor States would 
soon have consolidated into a strong union of their 
own. There was every reason for hastening it, 
and none so strong for hindering it as those which 
were overborne in the union which was actually 
formed soon afterward between the free-labor and 
slave-labor States. To such a Northern union 
the border States, as they sloughed off the old 
system, would have been naturally attracted ; nor 
can there be a doubt that a federal union so 
formed would ultimately have proved quite as 
strong, quite as prosperous, quite as happy, and 
quite as respectable among the nations, as one 
purchased by compromises with slavery, followed, 
as those compromises w^ere, by three quarters of a 
century of bitter political strife ending in a civil 
war. 

But the Northern members were no less ready to 
make compromises than Southern members were 
to insist upon them, these no more understanding 
what they conceded than those understood what 
they gained; for the future was equally concealed 
from both. A committee reported that two blacks 
should be rated as one free man. This was un- 
satisfactory. To some it seemed too large, to 



IN CONGRESS. 



43 



otliers too small. Other ratios, therefore, were 
proposed — three to one, three to two, four to 
one, and four to three. Mr. INIadison at last, *' in 
order," as he said, '' to give a proof of the sincer- 
ity of his professions of liberalitv^^" — and doubt- 
less he meant to be liberal, — proposed "that 
slaves should be rated as five to three." His mo- 
tion was adopted, but afterward reconsidered. 
Four days later — April 1st — Mr. Hamilton re- 
newed the proposition, and it was carried, Mad- 
ison says, " without opposition."^ The law on 
this point was the precedent for the mischievous 
three fifths rule of the Constitution adopted four 
years later. 

Youth finally overtook the young man during 
the last winter of his term in Congress, for he fell 
in love. But it was an unfortunate experience, 
and the outcome of it doubtless gave a more sombre 
hue than ever to his life. His choice was not a 
wise one. Probably Mr. Madison seemed a much 
older man than he really was at that period of his 
life, and to a young girl may have appeared really 
advanced in years. At any rate it was his un- 
happy fate to be attached to a young lady of more 
than usual beauty and of irrepressible vivacity, 

1 J. C. Hamilton says, in his His^oi-y of the Republic^ that " the 
motion prevailed by a vote of aU the States excepting Massachu- 
setts and Khode Island." But his understanding of the question 
is in other respects incorrect — misunderstood, one may hope, 
rather than misstated lest he should give credit, for what he con- 
sidered a meritorious action, to Madison. 



44 JAMES MADISON. 

— Miss Catherine Floyd, a daughter of General 
William Floyd of Long Island, N. Y., who was one 
of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, 
and who was a delegate to Congress from 1774 to 
1783. Miss Catherine's sixteenth birthday was in 
April of the latter year ; Madison was double her 
age, as his thirty-second birthday was a month 
earlier. His suit, how^ever, was accepted, and they 
became engaged. But it was the father rather 
than the daughter who admired the suitor ; for 
the older statesman better understood the char- 
acter, and better appreciated the abilities, of his 
young colleague, and predicted a brilliant career 
for him. The girl's wisdom was of another kind. 
The future career which she foresaw and wanted 
to share belonged to a young clergyman, who — 
according to the reminiscences of an aged relative 
of hers — "hung round her at the harpsichord," 
and made love in quite another fashion than that 
of the solemn statesman, whom the old general 
so approved of. It is altogether a pretty love 
story, and one's sympathy goes out to the lively 
young beauty, who was thinking of love and not 
of ambition, as she turned from the old young 
gentleman, discussing, with her wise father, the 
public debt and the necessity of an impost, to that 
really young j^oung gentleman who knew how to 
hang over the harpsichord, and talked more to 
the purpose with his eyes than ever the other 
could with his lips. There is a tradition that she 



IN CONGRESS. 45 

was encouraged to be thus on with the new love 
before she was off with the old, by a friend some- 
what older than herself ; and possibly this ma- 
turer lady may have thought that Madison would 
be better mated with one nearer his own age. At 
any rate the engagement was broken off before 
long by the dismissal of the older lover, much to 
the father's disappointment, and in due time the 
young lady married the other suitor. There is no 
reason that I know of for supposing that she ever 
regretted that her more humble home was in a 
rectory, when it might have been, in due time, 
had she chosen differently, in the White House at 
Washington, and that afterward she might have 
lived, the re-maining sixteen years of her life, the 
honored wife of a revered ex-President. Perhaps, 
however, she smiled in those later years at the 
recollection of having laughed in her gay and 
thoughtless youth at her solemn lover, and that 
when at last she dismissed him, she sealed her 
letter — conveying to him alone, it may be, some 
merry but mischievous meaning — with a bit of 
rye-dough.^ 

Mr. Rives gives a letter from Jefferson to Mad- 
ison at this time, which shows that he stood in 
need of consolation from his friends. ''I sincerely 

1 For the details, so far as they can now be recalled, of this 
single romantic incident in Mr. Madison's life, I am indebted 
to NicoU Floyd, Esq., of Moriches, Long Island, a great-grandson 
of General William Floyd. 



46 JAMES MADISON. 

lament," Mr. Jefferson wrote in his philosophical 
way, " the misadventure which has happened, from 
whatever cause it may have happened. Should it 
be final, however, the world presents the same and 
many other resources of happiness, and you pos- 
sess many within yourself. Firmness of mind and 
unintermitting occupation will not long leave you 
in pain. No event has been more contrary to my 
expectations, and these were founded on what I 
thought a good knowledge of the ground. But of 
all machines ours is the most complicated and 
inexplicable." It was Solomon who said, " there 
be three things which are too wonderful for me, 
yea four which I know not." This fourth was, 
"the way of a man with a maid." He might 
have added a fifth — the way of a maid with a 
man — which, evidently, is what Jefferson meant. 



CHAPTER IV. 

IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 

As the election of the same delegate to Con- 
gress for consecutive sessions was then forbidden 
by the law of Virginia, Mr. Madison was not re- 
turned to that body in 1784. For a brief inter- 
val of three months he made good use of his time, 
we are told, by continuing his law studies, till in 
the spring of tliat year he was chosen to repre- 
sent his county in the Virginia Assembly. It may 
be that *' the sentiments and manners of the pa- 
rent nation," which he lamented seven years be- 
fore, had passed away, and nobody now insisted 
upon tlie privilege of getting drunk at the candi- 
date's expense before voting for him. But it is 
more likely that the electors had not changed. 
The difference was in the candidate ; they did not 
need to be allured to give their votes to a man 
whom they were proud to call upon to represent 
the county. Mr. Madison's reputation was already 
made by his three years in Congress, and he now 
easily took a place among the political leaders of 
his own State. 

The position was hardly less conspicuous or less 



48 JAMES MADISON. 

influential than that which he had held in the na- 
tional Congress. What each State might do was of 
quite as much importance as anything the Federal 
Government might or could do. Congress could 
neither open nor close a single port in Virginia to 
commerce, whether domestic or foreign, witliout 
the consent of the State ; it could not levy a tax 
of a penny on anything, whether goods coming in 
or products going out, if the State objected. As 
a member of Congress, Mr. Madison might pro- 
pose or oppose any of these things ; as a member 
of the Virginia House of Delegates, he might, if 
his influence was strong enough, carry or forbid 
any or all of them, whatever might be the wishes 
of Congress. It was in the power of Virginia to 
influence largel}^ the welfare of her neighbors, so 
far as it depended upon commerce, and indirectly 
that of every State in the Union. 

In the Assembly, as in Congress, Mr. Madison's 
aim was to increase the powers of the Federal 
Government, for want of which it was rapidly sink- 
ing into imbecility and contempt. " I acceded," 
lie says, " to the desire of my fellow-citizens of 
the county that I should be one of its representa- 
tives in the legislature," to bring about " a rescue 
of the Union and the blessings of liberty staked 
on it from an impending catastrophe." Earl}^ in 
the session the Assembly assented to the amend- 
ment to the Articles of Confederation proposed at 
the late session of Congress, which substituted 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 49 

population for a land-valuation as the basis of rep- 
resentation and of taxation. The Assembly also 
asserted that all requisitions upon the States for 
the support of the general government and to pro- 
vide for the public debt should be compUed with, 
and payment of balances on old accounts should 
be enforced; and it assented to the recommenda- 
tion of Congress that that body should have power 
for a limited period to control the trade with for- 
eign nations having no treaty with the United 
States, in order that it might retaliate upon Great 
Britain for excluding American ships from her 
West India colonies. All these measures were de- 
signed for " the rescue of the Union," and they 
had, of course, Madison's hearty support. For it 
was absolutely essential, as he believed, that some- 
thing should hQ done if the Union was to be saved, 
or to be made worth saving. But there were ob- 
stacles on all sides. The commercial States were 
reluctant to surrender the control over trade to Con- 
gress ; in the planting States there was hardly any 
trade that could be surrendered. In Virginia the 
tobacco planter still clung to the old ways. He 
liked to have the English ship take his tobacco 
from the river bank of his own plantation, and to 
receive from the same vessel such coarse goods as 
were needed to clothe his slaves, with the more ex- 
pensive luxuries for his own family, — dry goods 
for his wnfe and daughter ; the pipe of madeira, the 
coats and breeches, the hats, boots, and saddles for 
4 



50 JAMES MADISON. 

himself and his sons. He knew that this year's 
crop went to pay — if it did pay — for last year's 
goods, and that he was always in debt. But the 
debt was on running account, and did not matter. 
The London factor Avas skillful in charges for in- 
terest and commissions, and the account for this 
year was always a lien on next year's crop. He 
knew, and the planter knew, that the tobacco could 
be sold at a higher price in New York or Phila- 
delphia than the factor got, or seemed to get, for 
it in London ; that the goods sent out in exchange 
were charged at a higher price than they could be 
bought for in the Northern towns. Nevertheless, 
the planter liked to see his own hogsheads rolled 
on board ship by his own negroes at his own 
wharf, and receive in return his own boxes and 
bales shipped direct from London at his own order, 
let it cost what it might. It was a shiftless and 
ruinous system ; but the average Virginia planter 
was not over-quick at figures, nor even at reading 
and writing. He was proud of being lord of a 
thousand or two acres, and one or two hundred 
negroes, and fancied that this was to rule over, as 
Mr. Rives called it, "a mimic commonwealth, 
with its foreign and domestic relations, and its reg- 
ular administrative hierarchy." He did not com- 
prehend that the isolated life of a slave plantation 
was ordinarily only a kind of perpetual barbecue, 
with its rough sports and vacuous leisure, where 
the roasted ox was largely wasted and not always 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 51 

pleasant to look at. There was a rude hospitality, 
where food, provided by unpaid labor, was cheap 
and abundant, and where the host was always glad 
to welcome any guest who would relieve him of his 
own tediousness ; but there was little luxury and 
no refinement where there was almost no culture. 
Of course there were a few homes and families of 
another order, where the women were refined and 
the men educated ; but these were the exceptions. 
Society generally, with its bluff, loud, self-con- 
fident but ignorant planters, its numerous poor 
whites, destitute of lands and of slaves, and its 
mass of slaves whose aim in life was to avoid work 
and escape the whip, was necessarily only one re- 
move from semi-civilization. 

It was not easy to indoctrinate such a people, 
more arrogant than intelligent, with new ideas. 
By the same token it might be possible to lead 
them into new ways before they would find out 
whither they were going. Mr. Madison hoped to 
change the wretched system of plantation-com- 
merce by a port bill, which he brought into the 
Assembly. Imposts require custom-houses, and 
obviously there could not be custom-houses nor 
even custom-officers on every plantation in the 
State. The bill proposed to leave open two ports 
of entry for all foreign ships. It would greatly 
simplify matters if all the foreign trade of the 
State could be limited to these two ports only. It 
would then be easy enough to enforce iui posts, 



52 JAMES MADISON. 

and the State would have sometliing to surrender 
to the Federal Government to help it to a revenue, 
if, happily, the time should ever come when all 
the States should assent to that measure of salva- 
tion for the Union. Not that this was the pri- 
mary object of those who favored this port law ; 
but the question of commerce was the question on 
which everything hinged, and its regulation in 
each State must needs have an influence, one way 
or the other, upon the possibility of strengthening, 
even of preserving, the Union. Everything de- 
pended upon reconciling these state interests by 
mutual concessions. The South was jealous of 
the North, because trade flourished at the North 
and did not flourish at the South. It seemed as 
if this was at the expense of tlie South, and so, 
in a certain sense, it was. The problem was to 
find where the difiiculty lay, and to apply the 
remedy. 

If commerce flourished at the North where each 
of the States had one or two ports of entry only, 
why should it not flourish in Virginia, if regulated 
in the same way ? If those centres of trade bred 
a race of merchants, who built their own ships, 
bought and sold, did their own carrying, competed 
with and stimulated each other, and encroached 
upon the trade of the South, why should not 
similar results follow in Virginia if she should 
confine her trade to two or three ports ? If the 
buyer and the seller, the importer and the con- 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 53 

siimer, went to a common place of exchange in 
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and pros- 
perity followed as a consequence, why should they 
not do the same thing at Norfolk? This was 
what Madison aimed to bring about by the port 
bill. But it was impossible to get it through the 
legislature till three more ports were added to 
the two which the bill at first proposed. When 
the planters came to understand that such a law 
would take away their cherished privilege of trade 
along the banks of the rivers, wherever anybody 
chose to run out a little jetty, the opposition was 
persistent. At every succeeding session, till the 
new Federal Constitution was adopted, an attempt 
was made to repeal the act ; and though that was 
not successful, each year new ports of entry were 
added. It did not, indeed, matter much whether 
the open ports of Virginia were two or whether 
they were twenty. There was a factor in the 
problem which neither Mr. Madison nor anybody 
else would take into the account. It was possible, 
of course, if force enough were used, to break up 
the traffic with English ships on the banks of the 
rivers ; but when that was done, commerce would 
follow its own laws, in spite of the acts of the 
legislature, and flow into channels of its own choos- 
ing. It was not possible to transmute a planting 
State, where labor was enslaved, into a commercial 
State, where labor must be free. 

However desirous Mr. Madison might be to 



54 JAMES MADISON. 

transfer the power over commerce to the Federal 
Government, he was compelled, as a member of 
the Virginia legislature, to care first for the trade 
of his own State. No State could alTord to neglect 
its own commercial interests so long as the thirteen 
States remained thirteen commercial rivals. It 
was becoming plainer and phuner every day, that 
while that relation continued, the less chance there 
was that thirteen petty, indepemlent States could 
unite into one great nation. No foreign power 
would make a treaty witli a government which 
could not enforce that treaty among its own peo- 
ple. Neither could any separate portion of that 
people make a treaty, as any other portion, the 
other side of an imaginary line, need not liold it 
in respect. What good was there in revenue laws, 
or, indeed, in any other laws in jNIassachusetts 
which Connecticut and Rhode Island disregarded ? 
or in New York, if New Jersey and Pennsyl- 
vania laughed at them ? or in Virginia, if Mary- 
land held them in contempt ? 

But Mr. Madison felt that, if he could bring 
about a healthful state of things in the trade of 
his own State, there was at least so much done 
towards bringing about a healthful state of things 
in the commerce of the whole country. There 
came up a practical, local question which, when 
the time came, he was quick to see had a logical 
bearing upon the general question. The Poto- 
mac was the boundary line between Virginia and 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 65 

Maryland ; but Lord Baltimore's charter gave to 
Maryland jurisdiction over tlie river to the Vir- 
ginia bank ; and this right Virginia had recog- 
nized, claiming only for herself the free navigation 
of the Potomac and the Pocoraoke. Of course 
the laws of neither State were regarded when it 
was worth while to evade them : and nothing was 
easier than to evade them, since to the average 
human mind there is no privilege so precious as 
a facility for smuggling. Nobody, at any rate, 
seems to have thought anything about the matter 
till it came under Madison's observation after his 
return home from Congress. To him it meant 
something more than mere evasion of state laws 
and frauds on the state revenue. The subject fell 
into line with his reflections upon the looseness of 
the bonds that held the States together, and how 
unlikely it was that they would ever grow into a 
respectable or prosperous nation while their pres- 
ent relations continued. Virtually there was no 
maritime law on the Potomac, and hardly even 
the pretense of any. What could be more absurd 
than to provide ports of entry on one bank of a 
river, while on the other bank, from the source to 
the sea, the whole country was free to all comers ? 
If the laws of either State were to be regarded 
on the opposite bank, a treaty was as necessary 
between them as between any two contiguous 
States in Europe. 

Madison wrote to Jefferson, who was now a del- 



56 JA31ES MADISON. 

egate in Congress, pointing out this anomalous 
condition of things on the Potomac, and suggest- 
ing that he should confer with the Maryland del- 
egates upon the subject. The proposal met with 
Jefferson's approbation ; he sought an interview 
with j\Ir. Stone, a delegate from Maryland, and, 
as he wrote to Madison, " finding him of the same 
opinion, [I] have told him I would, by letters, 
bring the subject forward on our part. They will 
consider it, therefore, as originated by this con- 
versation." Why '* they " should not have been 
permitted to "consider it as originated" from 
Madison's suggestion that Jefferson should have 
such a conversation is not quite plain ; for it was 
Madison, not Jefferson, who had discovered that 
here was a wrong that ought to be righted, and 
who had proposed that each State should appoint 
commissioners to look into the matter and aj)ply a 
remedy. So, also, so far as subsequent negotia- 
tion on this subject had any influence in bringing 
about the Constitutional Convention of 1787, it 
was only because Mr. Madison, having suggested 
the first practical step in the one case, seized an 
opportune moment in that negotiation to suggest 
a similar practical step in the other case. As it is 
so often said that the Annapolis Convention of 
1786 was the direct result of the discussion of the 
Potomac question, it is worth while to explain 
what they really had to do witli each other. 

The Virginia commissioners were appointed 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 57 

early in the session on Mr. Madison's motion. 
Maryland moved more slowly, and it was not till 
the spring of 1785 that the commissioners met. 
They soon found that any efficient jurisdiction 
over the Potomac involved more interests than 
they, or those who appointed them, had consid- 
ered. Existing difficulties might be disposed of by 
agreeing upon uniform duties in the two States, 
and this the commissioners recommended. But 
when the subject came before the Maryland leg- 
islature it took a wider range. 

Tlie Potomac Company, of which Washington 
was president, had been chartered only a few 
months before. The work it proposed to do was 
to make the upper Potomac navigable, and to con- 
nect it by a good road with the Ohio River. This 
was to encourage the settlement of Western lands. 
Another company was chartered about the same 
time to connect the Potomac and Delaware by a 
canal, where inter-state traffic would be more im- 
mediate. Pennsylvania and Delaware must nec- 
essarily have a deep interest in both these proj- 
ects, and the Maryland legislature proposed that 
those States be invited to appoint commissioners 
to act with those whom Maryland and Virginia 
had already appointed to settle the conflict be- 
tween them upon the question of jurisdiction on 
the Potomac. Then it occurred to somebody : if 
four States can confer, why should not thirteen ? 
The Maryland legislature thereupon suggested 



58 JAMES MADISON. 

that all the States be invited to send delegates to 
a convention to take up the whole question of 
American commerce. 

While this was going on in Maryland, the Vir- 
ginia legislature was considering petitions from 
the principal ports of the State praying that some 
remedy might be devised for the commercial evils 
from which they were all suffering. The port 
bill had manifestly proved a failure. It was only 
a few weeks before that Madison had complained, 
'y a letter to a friend, that " the trade of the coun- 
try is in a most deplorable condition ; " that the 
most " shameful frauds " were committed by the 
EngHsh merchants upon those in Virginia, as well 
as upon the planters who shipped their own to- 
bacco ; that the difference in the price of tobacco 
at Philadelphia and in Virginia was from eleven 
shillings to fourteen shillings in favor of the 
Northern ports ; and that " the price of merchan- 
dise here is, at least, as much above, as that of to- 
bacco is below, the Northern standard." He was 
only the more confirmed in his opinion that there 
was no cure for these radical evils except to sur- 
render to the Confederate Government complete 
control over commerce. The debate upon these 
petitions was hot and long. It brought out the 
strongest men on both sides, Madison leading 
those who wished to give to Congress the power 
to regulate trade with foreign countries when no 
treaty existed ; to make uniform commercial laws 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 59 

for all the States ; and to levy an impost of five 
per cent, on imported merchandise, as a provision 
for the public debt and for the support of the 
Federal Government generally. A committee, of 
which he was a member, at length reported in- 
structions to the delegates of the State in Con- 
gress to labor for the consent of all the States to 
these propositions. But in Committee of the 
Whole the resolutions were so changed and quali- 
fied — especially in limiting to thirteen years the 
period for which Congress was to be intrusted 
with a power so essential to the existence of the 
government — that the measure was given up by 
its friends as hopeless. 

But before the report was disposed of Mr. Mad- 
ison prepared a resolution, to be offered as a sub- 
stitute, with the hope of reaching the same end in 
another way. This resolution provided for the 
appointment of five commissioners, — Madison to 
be one of them, — " who, or any three of whom, 
shall meet such commissioners as may be ap- 
pointed in the other States of the Union, at a 
time and place to be agreed on, to take into con- 
sideration the trade of the United States ; to ex- 
amine the relative situations and trade of said 
States ; to consider how far a uniform system in 
their commercial regulations may be necessary to 
their common interest and their permanent har- 
mony ; and to report to the several States such an 
act, relative to this great object, as, when unani- 



60 JAMES MADISON. 

mously ratifiecl b}^ them, will enable the United 
States, in Congress, effectually to provide for the 
same." This he was careful not to offer himself, 
but, as he says, it was " introduced by Mr. Tyler, 
an influential member, — who, having never served 
in Congress, had more the ear of the House than 
those whose services there exposed them to an im- 
putable bias." He adds that "it was so little ac- 
ceptable, that it was not then persisted in." 

About the same time the action of the Mary- 
land legislature on the Potomac question, and 
the report of the Potomac commissioners, came 
up for consideration. Mr. Madison said afterward 
that, as Maryland thought the concurrence of 
Pennsylvania and Delaware were necessary to the 
regulation of trade on that river, so those States 
would, probably, wish to ask for the concurrence 
of their neighbors in any proposed arrangement. 
"So apt and forcible an illustration," he adds, 
"of the necessity of an uniformity throughout all 
the States could not but favor the passage of a 
resolution which proposed a convention having 
that for its object." 

As one of the Potomac commissioners, he knew, 
of course, what was coming from Maryland, and 
" how apt and forcible an illustration " it would 
seem, when it did come, of that resolution which 
he had written and had induced Mr. Tyler to 
offer. It did not matter that the resolution had 
been at the moment "so little acceptable," and 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 61 

therefore " not then persisted in." It was where 
it was sure, in the political slang of our day, to 
do the most good. And so it came about. All 
that Maryland had proposed, growing out of the 
consideration of the Potomac question, the Vir- 
ginia legislature acceded to. Then, on the last 
day of the session, the Madison-Tyler resolution 
was taken from the table, where it had lain quietly 
for nearly two months, and passed. If some, who 
had been contending all winter against any action 
which should lead to a possibility of strengthening 
the Federal Government, failed to see how impor- 
tant a step they had taken to that very end ; if 
any, who were fearful of Federal usurpation and 
tenacious of state-rights, were blind to the fact 
that the resolution had pushed aside the Potomac 
question and put the Union question in its place, 
Mr. Madison, we may be sure, was not one of that 
number. He had gained that for which he had 
been striving for years. 

The commissioners appointed by the resolution 
soon came together. They appointed Annapolis 
as the place, and the second Monday of the fol- 
lowing September (1786) as the time of the pro- 
posed national convention ; and they sent to all 
the other States an invitation to send delegates to 
that convention. 

On September 11 commissioners from Virginia, 
Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jerse}^ and New 
York assembled at Annapolis. Others bad been 



62 JAMES MADISON. 

appointed by North Carolina, Rhode Island, Mas- 
sachusetts, and New Hamj^shire, but they were 
not present. Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, 
and Connecticut had taken no action upon the 
subject. As five States only were represented, 
the commissioners " did not conceive it advisable 
to proceed on the business of their mission," but 
they adopted an address, written by Alexander 
Hamilton, to be sent to all the States. 

All the represented States, the address said, had 
authorized their commissioners " to take into con- 
sideration the trade and commerce of the United 
States ; to consider how far an uniform system 
in their commercial intercourse and regulations 
might be necessary to their common interest and 
permanent harmony." But New Jersey had gone 
farther than this ; her delegates were instructed 
" to consider how far an uniform system in their 
commercial regulations and other important mat- 
ters^ might be necessar^^ to the common interest 
and permanent harmony of the several States." 
This, the commissioners present thought, " was an 
improvement on the original plan, and will de- 
serve to be incorporated into that of a future con- 
vention." They gave their reasons at length for 
this opinion, and, in conclusion, urged that com- 
missioners from all the States be appointed to 
meet in convention at Philadelphia on the second 
Monday of the following May (1787), "to devise 
such further provisions as shall ajDpear to them 



IN THE STATE ASSEMBLY. 63 

iiecessaiy to render the Constitution of the Fed- 
eral Government adequate to the exigencies of the 
Union." 

In the course of the winter delegates to this 
convention were chosen by the several States. 
Virginia was the first to choose her delegates; 
Madison was among them, and at their head was 
George Washington. 



CHAPTER V. 

IN THE VIEGIXIA LEGISLATURE. 

That the Annapolis Convention ever met to 
make smooth the way for the more important one 
which came together eight months afterward and 
framed a permanent Constitution for the United 
States, was unquestionably due to the persistence 
and the political adroitness of j\lr. Madison. But 
it was not exceptional work. The same diligence 
and devotion to public duty mark the whole of 
this period of three years through which he con- 
tinued a member of the state legislature. As 
chairman of the judiciary committee he reduced 
with much labor the old colonial statutes to a 
body of laws befitting the condition of free citi- 
zens in an independent State. From his first to 
his last session he contended, though without suc- 
cess, for the faith of treaties and the honest pay- 
ment of debts. The treaty with England pro- 
vided that there should be '' no lawful impediment 
on either side to the recovery of debts heretofore 
contracted." The legislature notified Congress 
that it should disregard this provision, on the plea 
that in relation to "slaves and other property " it 



IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 65 

had not been observed by Great Britain. Mr. 
Madison did not then know that — as he said 
three years later — " the infractions [of the 
treaty] on the part of the United States preceded 
even the violation on the other side in the in- 
stance of the negroes." He maintained, neverthe- 
less, that the settlement of the difficulty, if it had 
any real foundation, belonged to Congress, the 
party to the treaty, and not to a State which had 
surrendered the treaty-making power ; and that 
in common honesty one planter was not relieved 
from his obligation to pay a London merchant for 
goods and merchandise received before the war, 
because other planters had not been paid for the 
negroes and horses they had lost when the British 
troops invaded Virginia. At each of the three 
sessions of the legislature, while he was a member, 
he tried to bring that body to adopt some line of 
conduct which should not — to use his own words 
— " extremely dishonor us and embarrass Con- 
gress." It was useless ; the repudiators were 
quite deaf to any appeals either to their honor or 
their patriotism. 

On another question both he and his State were 
more fortunate. Religious freedom had to be 
once more fought for, and he was quick to come 
to the defense of a right which had first called 
forth his youthful enthusiasm. Two measures 
were brought forward from session to session to 
secure for the church the support of the state. 



66 JAMES MADISON. 

The first was a bill for the incorporation of relig- 
ious societies ; but when it was pushed to its final 
passage it provided for the incorporation of Epis- 
copal churches only. For this Mr. Madison con- 
sented to vote, though with reluctance, in the 
hope that tlie church party would be so far satis- 
fied with this measure as to abstain from pushing 
another which was still more objectionable. 

He was disappointed. Naturally those who 
had carried their first point were the more, not 
the less, anxious for further success. Now it was 
insisted that there should be a universal tax " for 
the support of teachers of the Christian religion." 
The tax-payer was to be permitted to name the 
religious society for the support of which he pre- 
ferred to contribute. If he declined this volun- 
tary acquiescence in the law, the money would be 
used in aid of a school ; but from the tax itself 
none were to be exempt on any j^retext. Madi- 
son was quick to see in such a law the possibility 
of religious intolerance, of compulsory uniformity 
enforced by the civil power, and of the suppres- 
sion of any freedom of conscience or opinion. 
The act did not define who were and who were 
not " teachers of the Christian religion," and that 
necessarily would be left to the courts to decide. 
A state church would be the inevitable conse- 
quence ; for it was not to be supposed that any 
dominant sect would rest till it secured the recocf- 
nition by law of its own denomination as the sole 



IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 67 

representative of the Christian religion. To ex- 
pect anything else was to ignore the teacliings of 
all history. ^ 

The burden of opposition and debate fell, at 
first, almost solely upon Madison. Some of the 
wisest and best men of the State were slow to see, 
as he saw, that religious freedom was in danger 
from such legislation. There was, it was said, a 
sad falling-off in public morality as indifference to 
religion increased. There was no cure, it was de- 
clared, for prevalent and growing corruption ex- 
cept in the culture of the religious sentiment, and 
the teachers of religion, therefore, must be upheld 
and supported. But granting all this, Madison 
saw that the proposed remedy would be to give 
not bread but a stone, and a stone that would be 
used in return as a weapon. It was impossible to 
regulate religious belief by act of the Assembly, 
and therefore it was worse than foolish to try. 

It was due to him that the question was post- 
poned from one session to the next. A copy of 
the bill was sent, meanwhile, into every county of 
the State for the consideration of the people, and 
that was aided by a " Memorial and Remon- 
strance," written by IMadison, which was circu- 
lated everywhere for signature, in readiness for 
presentation to the next legislature. The bill, 
the memorial said, would be " a dangerous abuse 
of power," and the signers protested against it 
with unanswerable arguments taking for a start- 



68 JAMES MADISON. 

ing-point the assertion of the Bill of Rights, "that 
religion, or the duty we owe to our Creator, and 
the manner of discharging it, can be directed only 
by reason and conviction, not by force or violence." 
It is not at all improbable that many signed this 
remonstrance, not so much because they believed 
it to be true, as because it was a protest against a 
tax; that others were more moved by jealousy of 
the power of the Episcopal Church than they were 
by anxiety to protect religious liberty outside of 
their own sects. But whatever the motives, the 
movement was too formidable to be disregarded. 
It was made a test question in the election of 
members for the legislature of 1785-86 ; at that 
session the bill for the support of religious teach- 
ers was rejected, and in place of it was passed "an 
act for establishing religious freedom," written by 
Jefferson seven years before. This provided " that 
no man shall be compelled to frequent or support 
any religious worship, place, or ministry whatso- 
ever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, 
or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall other- 
wise suffer on account of his religious opinions or 
belief ; but that all men shall be free to profess, 
and by argument maintain, their opinions in mat- 
ters of religion, and that the same shall in no 
wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil ca23ac- 
ities." 1 

1 With how much interest Jefferson watched the progress of this 
controversy he showed in his letters from Paris. In February, 



IN THE VIRGIN/A LEGISLATURE. 69 

In the memorial and remonstrance Madison 
had said : " If this freedom be abused, it is an 
offense against God, not against man. To God, 
therefore, not to man, must an account of it be ren- 
dered." If the people of Virginia did not clearly 
comprehend this doctrine in all its length and 
breadth a hundred years ago, it is not quite easy 
to say who were then, or who are now at liberty 
to throw stones at them. The assertion of the 
broadest religious freedom was no more new then 
than it is true that persecution for opinion's sake 
is now only an ancient evil. It was not till fifty 

1786, he wrote to Madison, "I thank you for the communication 
of the remonstrance a^zainst the assessment. Mazzei, who is now 
in Holland, promised me to have it published in the Leyden Ga- 
zette. It will do us great honor. I wish it may be as much ap- 
proved by our Assembly, as by the wisest part of Europe." 
Again, in December of the same year, he says, " The Virginia Act 
for religious freedom has been received with infinite approbation in 
Europe, and propagated with enthusiasm. I do not mean by the 
governments, but by the individuals who compose them. It has 
been translated into French and Italian, has been sent to most of 
the courts of Europe, and has been the best evidence of the false- 
hood of those reports, which stated us to be in anarchy. It is in- 
serted in the Encyclopedie, and is appearing in most of the publica- 
tions respecting America. In fact, it is comfortable to see the stand- 
ard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which 
the human mind had been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and 
nobles ; and it is honorable for us to have produced the first legis- 
lature who had the courage to declare, that the reason of man 
may be trusted with the formation of his owa. opinions ! " This 
latter passage is characteristic, and many who do not like Jeffer- 
son will read between the lines the exultation of a man who was 
not always careful to draw the line between religious liberty and 
irreligious license. 



70 JAMES MADISON. 

years after Virginia had refused to tax her citi- 
zens for the support of religious teachers, that 
Massachusetts repealed the law that had long im- 
posed a similar burden upon her people. 

It was in 1786, the last year of Madison's ser- 
vice in the Virginia Assembly before he returned 
to Congress, that the craze of paper money broke 
out again through all the States. The measure 
was carried in most of them, followed in the end 
by the usual disastrous consequences. Madison's 
anxiety was great lest his own State should be 
carried away by this delusion, and he led the op- 
position against some petitions sent to the Assem- 
bly praying for an issue of currency. The vote 
against it was too large to be due altogether to 
his influence ; but he gave great strength and 
concentration to the opposition. In Virginia to- 
bacco certificates supplied in some measure the 
want of a circulating medium, and it was, there- 
fore, easier there than in some of the other States 
to resist the clamor for a paper substitute for real 
money. A tobacco certificate at least represented 
something worth money. Madison assented to 
a bill which authorized the use of such certifi- 
cates. But his "acquiescence," he wrote to Wash- 
ington, " was extorted by a fear that some greater 
evil, under the name of relief to the people, would 
be substituted." He was " far from being sure," 
he added, that he " did right." But no evils with 
which he had to reproach himself followed that 
measure. 



IN THE VIRGINTA LEGISLATURE. 71 

These three years of his life were probably 
among the happiest, if they were not altogether 
the happiest, in his long public career. There 
was little disapj^ointment or anxiety, and evi- 
dently much genuine satisfaction as he saw how 
certainly he was gaining a high place in the esti- 
mation of his fellow-citizens for his devotion to the 
best inberests of his native State. In the recesses 
of the legislature he had leisure for studies in 
which he evidently found great contentment. He 
traveled a good deal at intervals, especially at the 
North ; learned much of the resources and char- 
acter of the people outside of Virginia, and be- 
came acquainted with the leading men among 
them. Jefferson urged him to pass a summer 
with him in Paris ; and some foreign diplomatic 
service was open to him, had he expressed a will- 
ingness to accept it. But he preferred to know 
something more of his own country while he had 
the leisure ; and if his life was to be passed in 
public service, as now seemed probable to him, he 
chose, at least for the present, to serve his country 
at home, where he thought he was more needed, 
rather than abroad. In his orders for books sent 
to Jefferson the direction of his studies is evident. 
He sought largely for those which treated of the 
science of government ; but they were not con- 
fined to that subject. Natural history had great 
charms for him. He was a diligent student of 
Buffon, and was anxious to find, if possible, the 



72 JAMES MADISON. 

plates of liis thirty-one volumes, in colors, that he 
might adorn the walls of his room with them. He 
made careful comparisons between the animals of 
other continents, as described and portrayed by 
the naturalist, and similar orders in America. All 
new inventions interested him. "I am so pleased," 
he writes, " with the new invented lamp that I 
shall not grudge two guineas for one of them." 
He had seen " a pocket compass of somewhat 
laiger diameter than a watch, and which may be 
carried in the same way. It has a spring for 
stopping the vibration of the needle when not in 
use. One of these would be very convenient in 
case of a ramble into the western country." A 
small telescope, he suggests, might be fitted on as 
a handle to a cane, which might " be a source of 
many little gratifications," when " in walks for ex- 
ercise or amusement objects present themselves 
which it might be matter of curiosity to inspect, 
but which it was difficult or impossible to ap- 
proach." Jefferson writes him of a new invention, 
a pedometer ; and he wants one for his own 
pocket. Trifles like these show the bent of his 
mind ; and they show a contented mind as well. 

While writing of important acts of the legis- 
lature of 1785, he is careful to give other infor- 
mation in a letter to Jefferson, which is not unin- 
teresting as written ninety-eight years ago, and 
written by him. 

"I. Rumsey," he says, "by a raemoiial to the last 



IN THE VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE. 73 

session, represented that he had invented a mechanism 
by which a boat might be worked with little labor, at the 
rate of from twenty-five to forty miles a day, ao-ainst 
a stream running at the rate of ten miles an hour, and 
prayed that the disclosure of his invention might be pur- 
cliased by the public. The apparent extravagance of his 
pretensions brought a ridicule upon them, and nothino- 
was done. In the recess of the Assembly he exemplified 
his machinery to General Washington and a few other 
gentlemen, who gave'a certificate of the reality and im- 
portance of the invention, which opened the ears of this 
Assembly to a second memorial. The act gives a mo- 
nopoly for ten years, reserving a right to abolish it at 
any time by paying £10,000. The inventor is soliciting 
similar acts from other States, and will not, I suppose, 
publish the secret till he either obtains or despairs of 
them." 

This intelligence was evidently not unheeded 
by Jefferson. In writing, some months after he 
received it, to a friend on the application of steam- 
power to grist-mills, then lately introduced in 
England, he adds : " I hear you are applying the 
same agent in America to navigate boats, and I 
have little doubt but that it will be applied gen- 
erally to machines, so as to supersede the use of 
water-ponds, and of course to lay open all the 
streams for navigation." Nor does Madison seem 
to have been one of those who doubted if anything 
was to come of Rumsey's invention. All this was 
less than a hundred years ago, and now there is a 
steam-ferry between New York and Europe run- 
ning about twice a day. 



74 JAMES MADISON. 

In a similar letter, a year later, he is careful, 
among grave political matters, to remember and 
report to the same friend that in the sinking of a 
well in Richmond, on the declivity of a hill, there 
had been found, "about seventy feet below the 
surface, several large bones, apparently belonging 
to a fish not less than the shark ; and, what is more 
singular, several fragments of potter's w'are in the 
style of the Indians. Before* he [the digger] 
reached these curiosities he passed through about 
fifty feet of soft blue clay." INIr. Madison had 
only just heard of this discovery, and he had not 
seen the unearthed fragments. But he evidently 
accepts the story as true in coming from " unex- 
ceptionable witnesses." He adds, as a corrobora- 
tion, that he is told by a friend from Washington 
County of the finding there, in the sinking of a 
salt-well, " of the hip-bone of the incognitum, the 
socket of which was about eight inches in diam- 
eter." Such things were peculiarly interesting to 
Jefferson, and Madison w^as too devoted a friend 
to him to leave them unnoticed. But they were 
hardly less interesting to himself, though he had 
not much of Jefferson's habit of scientific investi- 
gation. That "the potter's ware in the style of 
the Indians" should be found so deeply buried 
only seems to him " singular ; " nor, indeed, is there 
any record, so far as we know, that this particular 
fact was any more suggestive to Jefferson, though 
apparently so likely to arouse his inquiring mind 



THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION. 91 

State. The Revolution bad secured to each, it was 
maintained, a separate independence, achieved, it 
was true, by united efforts, but not therefore bind- 
ing them together as a single nation. It was held 
as a legitimate result of that doctrine that each 
State, not the people of the State whether many 
or few, should be represented by the same number 
of votes in a federal government as they were un- 
der the Articles, of Confederation, because such a 
government was a union of States not of a people. 
All men, it was argued, — going back to a state 
of nature, — are equally free and independent ; 
and when a government is formed every man has 
an equal share by natural right in its formation 
and in its subsequent conduct. While numbers 
are few every member of the State exercises his 
individual right in person, and none can rightfully 
do more than this, however wise, or powerful, or 
rich he may be. But when government by the 
whole bod}^ of the people becomes cumbersome 
and inconvenient through increase of numbers, the 
individual citizen loses none of his rights by in- 
trusting their exercise to representatives, in choos- 
ing and instructing whom all have an equal voice. 
So when States are united in a confederacy each 
State has the same relation to that government 
that individuals have to each other in a single 
State. They are free and equal, and none has a 
larger share of rights in the confederacy because 
its people are more numerous, or because it is 



92 JAMES MADISON. 

richer or more powerful, than the rest. In such a 
confederacy it is not the individual citizen who is 
to be represented, but the individual State. In 
such a confederacy there w^ould be the same rep- 
resentation for a State, say of ten thousand inhab- 
itants, as for one of fifty thousand. This, it was 
maintained, preserved equality of suffrage in the 
equality of States ; while the representation of the 
individual citizens of the States would be in real- 
ity inequality of suffrage because the autonomy of 
the State would be lost sight of. If in such a case 
it were asked, what had become of the rights 
which the majority of forty thousand had inher- 
ited from nature ; the answer was that those 
rights were preserved and represented in the 
state government. The difficulty, nevertheless, 
remained : how to reconcile in practice this doc- 
trine of the equal rights of States, where there 
might be a minority of persons, with the actual 
rights of the whole people where, according to the 
underlying democratic doctrine, the good of the 
whole must be decided by the larger number. 

Those who proposed only to amend the old 
Articles of Confederation and opposed a new Con- 
stitution, objected that a government formed un- 
der such a Constitution would be not a federal, 
but a national, government. Luther Martin said, 
when he returned to Marj^land, that the delegates 
" appeared totally to have forgot the business for 
which we were sent. . . . We had not been sent 



THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION. 93 

to form a government over the inhabitants of 
America considered as individuals. . . . That the 
system of government we were intrusted to pre- 
pare was a government over these thirteen States; 
but that in our proceedings we adopted principles 
which would be right and proper only on the sup- 
position that there were no state governments at 
all, but that all the inhabitants of this extensive 
continent were in their individual capacity, with- 
out' government, and in a state of nature." He 
added that, " in the whole system there was but 
one federal feature, the appointment of the sena- 
tors by the States in their sovereign capacity, that 
is by their legislatures, and the equality of suf- 
frage in that branch ; but it was said that this 
feature was only federal in appearance." 

The Senate, the second house as it was called 
in the convention, was in part created, it is need- 
less to say, to meet, or rather in obedience to, rea- 
soning like this. There was almost nobody who 
would have been willing to abandon the state 
governments, as there was next to nobody who 
wanted a monarchy. " We were eternally trou- 
bled," Martin said, "with arguments and prece- 
dents from the British government." He could 
not get beyond the fixed notion that those whom 
he opposed were determined to establish " one gen- 
eral government over this extensive continent, of 
a monarchical nature." If he, and those who 
agreed with him, sincerely believed this to be 



94 JAMES MADISON. 

true, it was natural enough that the frequent al- 
hisions to British precedents, as wise rules for 
American guidance in constructing a government, 
should be looked upon as an unmistakable hanker- 
ing after lost flesh-pots. Should the state govern- 
ments be swept away it might be that, in time of 
danger from without or of peril from internal dis- 
sensions, the country, under " a government of a 
monarchical nature," might drift back to its old 
allegiance. If those who feared, or said they 
feared, this were not quite sincere, the temptation 
was almost irresistible to use such arguments to 
arouse popular prejudice against political oppo- 
nents. It is curious that Madison seemed quite 
unconscious of how much the frequent allusions 
in his articles in " The Federalist " to the British 
Constitution might strengthen these accusations 
of the opposition ; while he half believed that the 
same thing in others sliowed in them a leaning to- 
ward England, from which he knew that he him- 
self was quite free. 

The Luther Martin protestants were too radical 
to remain in the convention to the end, when they 
saw that such a confederacy as they wanted was 
impossible. But there were not raan}^ who went 
the length they did in believing that a strong cen- 
tral government was necessarily the destruction 
of the state governments. Still fewer were those 
who would have brought this about if they could. 
That the rights of the States must be preserved 



THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION. 95 

was the general opinion and determination, and it 
was not difficult to do this by limiting the powers 
of the higher government, or federal as it soon 
came to be called, and by the organization of the 
second house, the Senate, in which all the States 
had an equal representation. The smaller States 
were satisfied with this concession, and the larger 
were willing to make it, not only for the sake of 
the Union, bat because of the just estimate in 
which they held the rights belonging to all the 
States alike. The real difficulty, as Madison said 
in the debate on that question, and as he repeated 
again and again after that question was settled, 
was not between the larger and smaller States, 
but between the North and the South; between 
those States that held slaves and those that had 
none. 

Slavery in the Constitution, which has given so 
much trouble to the Abolitionists of this century, 
and, indeed, to everybody else, gave quite as much 
in the last century to those who put it there. Many 
of the wisest and best men of the time, Southern- 
ers as Avell as Northerners, and among them Mad- 
ison, were opposed to slavery. They could see 
little good in it, hardly even any compensation for 
the existence of a system so full of evil. There 
was hardly a State in the Union at that time that 
had not its emancipation society ; and there was 
hardly a man of au}^ eminence in the country who 
was not an officer, or at least a member, of suck 



96 JAMES MADISON. 

a society. Everywhere north of South Carolina, 
slavery was looked upon as a misfortune Avbich it 
was exceedingly desirable to be free from at the 
earliest possible moment; everywhere north of 
Mason and Dixon's Line, measures had already 
been taken, or were certain soon to be taken, to 
put an end to it ; and by the Ordinance for the 
government of all the territory north of the Ohio 
Kiver, it was absolutely prohibited by Congress, in 
the same year in which the Constitutional Con- 
gress met. 

But it was, nevertheless, a thing to the con- 
tinued existence of which the anti-slavery people 
of that time could consent without any violation 
of conscience. Bad as it was, unwise, wasteful, 
cruel, a mockery of every pretense of respect for 
the rights of man, they did not believe it to be 
absolutely wicked. If they had so believed, let us 
hope they would have washed their hands of it. 
As it was, it was only a question of expediency 
whether, for the sake of the Union, they should 
protect the sj^stem of slavery, and give to the 
slave-holders, as slave-holders, a certain degree of 
political power. To refuse to admit a slave-hold- 
ing State into the Union did not occur, probably, 
to the most earnest opponent of the system ; for 
that would have been simply to say that there 
should be no Union. That was what Madison 
meant in saying so repeatedly that the real dif- 
ficulty in the way was, not the difference between 



THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION. 97 

the large and the small States, but the difference 
between the slave-holding and the non slave-hold- 
inof States. If there could be no conciliation on 
that point there could be no Union. 

Some hoped, perhaps, rather than believed, that 
slavery was likely to disappear ere long at the 
South as it was disappearing at the North. It is 
an impeachment of their intelligence, however, 
to suppose that they relied much upon any such 
hope. The simple truth is that slavery was then, 
as it continued to be for three quarters of a cen- 
tury longer, the paramount interest of the South. 
To withstand or disregard it was not merely diffi- 
cult, but was to brave immediate possible dangers 
and sufferings, which are never voluntarily en- 
countered except in obedience to the highest sense 
of duty ; or to meet a necessity, from which there 
was no manly way of escape. The sense of abso- 
lute duty was wanting ; the necessity, it was hoped, 
might be avoided by concessions. It can only be 
said for those who made them that they did not 
see what fruitful seeds of future trouble they were 
sowing in the Constitution. 
7 



CHAPTER VIII. 

"THE COMPROMISES." 

The question with tlie North was, how far could 
it yield; with the South, how far could it en- 
croach. It turned mainly on representation ; on 
" the unimportant anomaly," as Mr. George Tick- 
nor Curtis calls it in his " History of the Consti- 
tution," "of a representation of men without po- 
litical rights or social privileges." However much 
they differed upon the subject in the convention, 
there was nobody then and there who regarded 
the question as " unimportant ; " nor was there a 
political event to happen for the coming eighty 
years that it did not influence and generally gov- 
ern. Tliere were some who maintained at first 
that the slave population should not be repre- 
sented at all. Hamilton proposed in the first days 
of the convention " that the rights of suffrage in 
the national legislature ought to be proportioned 
to the number of free inhabitants." Madison was 
willing to concede this in one branch of the legis- 
lature, provided that in the representation in the 
other House the slaves were counted as free in- 
habitants. The constitution of the Senate subse- 
quently disposed of that proposition. 



''THE compromises:' 99 

But why should slaves be represented at all? 
" They are not free agents," said Patterson, a del- 
egate to the convention from New Jersey ; they 
"have no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring 
property ; but, on the contrary, are themselves 
property, and, like other property, entirely at the 
will of the master. Has a man in Virginia a 
number of votes in proportion to the number of 
his slaves ? And if negroes are not represented 
in the States to which they belong, why should 
they be represented in the general govej'nment? 
... If a meeting of the people was actually to 
take place in a slave State, would the slaves vote ? 
They would not. Why, then, should they be rep- 
resented in a federal government ? " There could 
be but one reply ; but that was one which it 
would not have been wise to make. It was slave 
property that was to be represented, and this 
would not be submitted to among slave-holders as 
against each other, while yet they were a unit in 
insisting upon it in a union with those who were 
not slave-holders. Among themselves slavery 
needed no protection ; their safety was in equal- 
ity. But to their great interest every non-slave- 
holder was, in the nature of things, an enemy ; and 
prudence required that the power either to vote 
him down or to buy him up should never be want- 
ing. It was as much a matter of instinct as of 
deliberation, for love of life is the first law. The 
truth was covered up in Madison's specious asser- 



100 JAMES MADISON. 

tion that "every peculiar interest, whether in 
any class of citizens or any description of States, 
onght to be secured as far as possible." The only 
" peculiar " interest, however, belonging either to 
citizens or States, that was imbedded in the Con- 
stitution, was slavery. 

So Wilson of Pennsylvania asked : " Are they 
[the slaves] admitted as citizens — then why are 
they not admitted on an equality with white citi- 
zens? Are they admitted as property — then 
why is not other property admitted into the com- 
putation ? " He was willing, however, to concede 
that it was a difficulty to be " overcome by the 
necessity of compromise." 

Never, probably, in the history of legislation, 
was there a more serious question debated. Com- 
promise is ordinarily understood to mean an ad- 
justment by mutual concessions, where there are 
rights on both sides. Here it meant whether the 
side, which had no shadow of right whatever to 
that which it demanded, would consent to take a 
little less than the whole. It was the kind of 
compromise made between the bandit and his vic- 
tim when the former decides that he will not put 
himself to the trouble of shooting the other, and 
will even leave him his shirt. It was not diffi- 
cult to understand that horses and cattle could be 
justly counted only where property was to be the 
basis of representation. Yet the slaves, who were 
counted, were, in the eye of the law, either per* 



''THE COMPROMISES.'' 101 

sonal property or real estate ; and were no more 
represented as citizens than if they also had gone 
upon all fours. Their enumeration, nevertheless, 
was carried, and it so increased the representative 
power of their masters that inequality of citizen- 
ship became the fundamental principle of the 
government. This, of course, was to form an oli- 
garchy, not a democracy. Practically the govern- 
ment was put in the hands of a class ; and there 
it remained from the moment of the adoption of 
the Constitution to the Rebellion of 1860 ; while 
that class, including those of so little consequence 
as to own only a slave or two, in its best estate, 
probably never exceeded ten per centum of the 
whole people. 

There was, if one may venture to say so, a sin- 
gular confusion in the minds of the venerable 
fathers of the republic on this subject. They 
could not quite get rid of the notion that the 
slaves, being human, ought to be included in the 
enumeration of population, notwithstanding that 
their enumeration as citizens must necessarily dis- 
appear in their representation as chattels. Slaves, 
as slaves, were the wealth of the South, as ships, 
for example, were the wealth of the North ; but, 
being human, the mind was not shocked at hav- 
ing the slaves reckoned as population in fixing the 
basis of representation, though in reality they 
only represented the masters' ownership. But 
nobody would have been at a loss to see the ab- 



102 JAMES MADISON. 

surdity of counting three fifths of the Northern 
ships as population. Even a Webster Whig of 
sixty-five years later could, perhaps, have under- 
stood that that was something more than an 
" unimportant anomaly." There was no clearer- 
headed man in the convention than Gouverneur 
Morris ; yet he said that he was " compelled to 
declare himself reduced to the dilemma of doing 
injustice to the Southern States or to human na- 
ture; and he must do it to the former." C. C. 
Pinckney of South Carolina declared that he was 
"alarmed" at such an avowal as that. Yet had 
the question been one of counting three fifths of 
the Northern ships in the enumeration of popu- 
lation, Morris would have discovered no " di- 
lemma," and Pinckney nothing to be " alarmed " 
at. So palpable an outrage on common sense 
would have been merely laughed at by both. 

In reply to Pinckney, however, Morris grew 
bolder. " It was high time," he said, " to speak 
out." He came there " to form a compact for the 
good of America. He hoped and believed that all 
would enter into such compact. If they wotdd 
not, he was ready to join with any States that 
would. But as the compact was to be voluntary, 
it is in vain for the Eastern States to insist on 
what the Southern States will never agree to. It 
is equally vain for the latter to require what the 
other States can never admit ; and he verily be- 
lieved the people of Pennsylvania will never 



''THE compromises:' 103 

agree to a representation of negroes : " of negroes, 
he meant, counted as human beings, not for their 
own representation, but, as ships might be counted, 
for the increased representation of those who held 
them as property. The next day he " spoke out " 
still more plainly. " If negroes," he said, " were 
to be viewed as inhabitants, . . . they ought to 
be added in their entire number, and not in the 
proportion of three fifths. If as property, the 
word wealth was right," — as the basis, that is, 
of representation. The distinction that had been 
set up by Madison and others between the North- 
ern and Southern States he considered as heret- 
ical and groundless. But it was persisted in, and 
*' he saw that the Southern gentlemen will not be 
satisfied, unless they see the way open to their 
gaining a majority in the public councils. . . . 
Either this distinction [between the North and 
the South] is fictitious or real ; if fictitious, let it 
be dismissed, and let us proceed with due confi- 
dence. If it be real, instead of attempting to 
blend incompatible things, let us at once take a 
friendly leave of each other." 

But could they take " a friendly leave of each 
other ? " Should a union be secured on the terras 
the South offered ? or should it be declined, as 
Morris proposed, if it could not be a union of 
equality ? The next day Madison again set forth 
the real issue, quietly but unmistakably. " It 
seemed now," he said, "to be pretty well under- 



{04 JAMES MADISON. 

stood, that the real difference of interests lay, not 
between the large and small, but between the 
Northern and Southern States. The institution 
of slavery and its consequences formed the line of 
discrimination." There is sometimes great power, 
as he well knew, in firm reiteration. So long as 
slavery lasted the lesson he then inculcated was 
never forgotten. Thenceforward, as then, " the 
line of discrimination," in Southern politics, lay 
with " slavery and its consequences." One side 
would abate nothing of its demands ; there could 
be no "friendly leave" unless the determination, 
on the other side, to overcome the desire for union 
and take the consequences was equally firm. 

When the question again came up, however, 
Morris had not lost heart. His talk was the talk 
of a modern abolitionist ; — 

" He never would concur in upholding domestio 
slavery. It was a nefarious institution. It was the 
curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed. 
Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where 
a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and 
happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty 
which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Mary- 
land, and the other States having slaves. Travel 
through the whole continent, and you behold the pros- 
pect continually varying with the appearance and dis- 
appearance of slavery. . . . Proceed southwardly, and 
every step you take through the great regions of 
slavery presents a desert increasing with the increasing 



''THE compromises:' 105 

proportion of these wretched beings. Upon what prin- 
ciple is it that the slaves shall be computed in the rep- 
resentation ? Are they men ? Then make them citizens, 
and let them vote. Are they property ? Why then is 
no other property included ? The houses in this city 
[Philadelphia] are worth more than all the wretched 
slaves who cover the rice swamps of South Carolina. 
. . . And what is the proposed compensation to the 
Northern States for a sacrifice of every principle of 
right, of every impulse of humanity ? They are to bind 
themselves to march their militia for the defense of the 
Southern States, for their defense against those very 
slaves of whom they complain? They must supply 
vessels and seamen in case of foreign attack. The leg- 
islature will have indefinite power to tax them by ex- 
cises and duties on imports, both of which will fall 
heavier on them than on the Southern inhabitants ; for 
the Bohea tea used by a Northern freeman will pay 
more tax than the whole consumption of the miserable 
slave, which consists of nothing more than his physical 
subsistence and the ras^s that cover his nakedness. . . . 
Let it not be said that direct taxation is to be propor- 
tioned to representation. It is idle to suppose thaf. the 
general government can stretch its hand directly into 
the pockets of the people scattered over so vast a coun- 
try. . . . He would sooner submit himself to a tax for 
paying for all the negroes in the United States, than 
saddle posterity with such a Constitution." 

So much of this as wfis not already fact was 
prophecy. Yet not many ^eeks later this impar.- 
Bioned orator put his name to the Constitution, 



106 - JAMES MADISON. 

though it had grown meanwhile into larger pro- 
slavery proportions. There was undoubtedly some 
sympathy with him among a few of the members ; 
but the general feeling was more truly expressed a 
few days later by Rutledge of South Carolina, in 
the debate on the continuance of the African slave- 
trade. "Religion and humanity," he said, "had 
nothing to do with this question. Interest alone 
is the governing principle with nations. The 
true question at present is, whether the Southern 
States shall or shall not be parties to the Union» 
If the Northern States consult their interest, the}'' 
will not oppose the increase of slaves, which will 
increase the commodities of which they will be- 
come the carriers." The response came from 
Connecticut, Oliver Ellsworth saying : " Let every 
State import what it pleases. The morality or 
wisdom of slavery are considerations belonging to 
the States themselves. What enriches a part en- 
riches the whole," — especially Newport and its 
adjacent coasts, he might have added, with its 
trade to the African coast. 

But a Virginian, George Mason, had another 
tone. He called the traffic " infernal." " Slavery," 
he went on, "discourages arts and manufactures. 
The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. 
They prevent the emigration of whites, who 
really enrich and strengthen a country. They 
produce the most 13erm(?ious effect on manners. 
Every master of slaves is .born a petty tyrant. 



''THE COMPROMISES.'' 107 

They bring the judgment of heaven on a coun- 
try. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished 
in the next world, they must be in this. By an 
inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence 
punishes national sins by national calamities." 

These were warnings worth heeding. But Ells- 
worth retorted with a sneer : " As he had never 
owned a slave, he could not judge of the effect of 
slavery on character." He said, however, that, 
" if it was to be considered in a moral light, we 
ought to go farther, and free those already in the 
country." But, so far from that, he thought it 
would be " unjust toward South Carolina and 
Georgia," in whose " sickly rice swamps " negroes 
died so fast, should there be any intermeddling to 
prevent the importation of fresh Africans to labor, 
and, of course, to perish there. Perhaps it was 
this shrewd argument of the Connecticut delegate 
that suggested, half a century afterward, to a Mis- 
sissippi agricultural society the economical cal- 
culation that it was cheaper to use up a gang of 
negroes ever}^ few years, and supply its place by a 
fresh gang from Virginia, than rely upon the 
natural increase that would follow their humane 
treatment as men and women. His colleague, 
Roger Sherman, came to Ellsworth's aid. It 
would be, he thought, the duty of the general 
government to prohibit the foreign trade in slaves, 
and should this be left in its power, it would prob- 
ably be done. But he would not, if the Southern 



108 JAMES MADISON. 

States made it the condition of consenting to tlie 
Constitution that the trade should be protected, 
leave it in the power of the general government 
to do that which he acknowledged that it should, 
and probably would, do. 

Delegates from Georgia and the Carolinas de- 
clared that to be the condition — among them C. 
C. Pinckney of South Carolina. *' He should con- 
sider," he said, " a rejection of the clause as an 
exclusion of South Carolina from the Union." 
Nevertheless he said to the people at home, when 
they came together to consider the Constitution : 
" We are so weak that by ourselves we could not 
form a union strong enough for the purpose of 
effectually protecting each other. Without union 
with the other States, South Carolina must soon 
fall." On the part of that State it had been a 
game of brag all along. The first lesson in the 
South Carolinian policy was given in the Consti- 
tutional Convention. Of the result, this was 
Pinckney's summing up to his constituents : — 

" By this settlement we have secured an unlimited im- 
portation of negroes for twenty years ; nor is it declared 
that the importation shall be then stopped ; it may be 
continued. We have a security that the general gov- 
ernment can never emancipate them, for no such author- 
ity is granted. . . . We have obtained a right to re- 
cover our slaves, in whatever part of America they may 
take refuge, which is a right we had not before. In 
short, considering all circumstances, we have made the 



" THE compromises:' 109 

best terms, for the security of this species of property, it 
was in our power to make. We would have made better 
if we could, but on the whole 1 do not think them bad." 

A more moderate and a more significant state- 
ment could hardly have been made. 

On the foreign slave-trade Madison had little 
to say, but, like most of the Southern delegates 
north of the Carolinas, he was opposed to it. 
" Twenty years," he said, " will produce all the 
mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty 
to import slaves. So long a term will be more 
dishonorable to the American character than to 
say nothing about it in the Constitution." The 
words are a little ambiguous, though he is his own 
reporter. But what he meant evidently was, that 
any protection of the trade would dishonor the na- 
tion ; for at another point of the debate, on the 
same day, he said that " he thought it wrong to 
admit in the Constitution the idea that there could 
be property in men." Such property he was 
anxious to protect as the great Southern inter- 
est, so long as it lasted ; but he was not willing 
to strengthen it by permitting the continuance of 
the African slave-trade for twenty years longer 
under the sanction of the Constitution. But he 
held it to be, as he wrote in " The Federalist," 
'' a great point gained in favor of humanity, that 
a period of twenty years may terminate forever 
within these States a traffic which has so long and 
so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern pol- 



110 JAMES MADISON. 

icy." He added, " the attempt that had been 
made to pervert this chiuse into an objection 
against the Constitution, by representing it as a 
criminal toleration of an illicit practice," was a 
misconstruction which he did not think deserving 
of an answer. 

It was, in fact, a bargain which he had not ap- 
proved of, and did not now probably care to talk 
about. It was made at the suggestion of Gouver- 
neur Morris, who moved that the foreign slave- 
trade, a navigation act, and a duty on exports be 
referred for consideration to a committee. " These 
things," he said, "may form a bargain among the 
Northern and Southern States." When the com- 
mittee reported in favor of the slave-trade, C. C. 
Pinckney proposed that its limitation should be 
extended from 1800 to 1808. Gorham of Massa- 
chusetts seconded the motion, and it was carried 
by the addition of the votes of New Hampshire, 
Massachusetts, and Connecticut to those of Mary- 
land, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. 

The committee also reported the substitution of 
a majority vote for that of two thirds in legisla- 
tion relating to commerce. The concession was 
made without much diflBculty, a Georgia delegate, 
and three of the four South Carolina delegates 
favoring it, two of the latter frankly saying they 
did so to gratify New England. It was, C. C. 
Pinckney said, " the true interest of the Southern 
States to have no regulation of commerce ; " but 



''THE compromises:' 111 

he assented to this projjosition, and his constitu- 
ents " would be reconciled to this liberality," be- 
cause, among other considerations, of " the liberal 
conduct [of the New England States] towards 
the views of South Carolina." There was no 
question of the meaning of this sudden avowal of 
friendly feeling. Jefferson relates in his " Ana," 
on the authority of George Mason, a member of 
the convention, that Georgia and South Carolina 
had "struck up a bargain with the three New 
England States, that if they would admit slaves 
for twenty years, the two Southernmost States 
would join in changing the clause which required 
two thirds of the legislature in any vote." 

The settlement of these questions was an oppor- 
tune moment for the introduction of that relating 
to fugitive slaves. Butler of South Carolina im- 
mediately proposed a section which should secure 
their return to their masters, and it was passed 
without a word. As Pinckney said in the passage 
already quoted, when he went back to report to 
his constituents, " it is a right to recover our slaves 
in whatever part of America they may take ref- 
uge, which is a right we had not before." 

It is notable how complete and final a settle- 
ment of the slavery question " these compromises," 
as they were called, seemed to be to those who 
made them. They were meant to be, as Mr. Mad- 
ison called them, " adjustments of the different 
interests of different parts of the country," and 



112 JAMES MADISON. 

being once agreed upon they were considered as 
Laving the binding force and stability of a con- 
tract. The evils of slavery were set forth as an 
element in the negotiation, but no question of es- 
sential morality was raised that brought the system 
within the category of forbidden wrong. What- 
ever results might follow would be limited, it was 
thought, by the terms of the contract ; whereas, in 
fact, the actual results were not foreseen, and could 
not be guarded against, except by the refusal to 
enter into any contract whatever. 

On all other questions involving political prin- 
ciples, — the just relations of the Federal Govern- 
ment and the governments of the States ; the re- 
lations between the larger and the smaller States ; 
the regulation of the functions of the executive, 
the legislative, and the judicial departments of 
government, — on all these the f ramers of the 
Constitution brought to bear the profoundest wis- 
dom. When one reflects upon the magnitude and 
character of the work, Madison's conclusion seems 
hardly extravagant, that " adding to these consid- 
erations the natural diversity of human opinions 
on all new and complicated subjects, it is impossi- 
ble to consider the degree of concord which ulti- 
mately prevailed as less than a miracle." There 
were, nevertheless, the gravest and most anxious 
doubts how far the Constitution would stand the 
test of time ; yet as a system of government for a 
nation of freemen it remains to this day practically 



''THE COMPROMISES.'' 113 

unclianged. But where its architects thought 
themselves wisest they were weakest. That which 
they thought they had settled forever was the one 
thing which they did not settle. Of all the "ad- 
justments " of the Constitution, slavery was pre- 
cisely^ that one which was not adjusted. 
\ Madison's responsibility for this result was that 
of every other delegate, — no more and no less. 
Neither he nor they, whether more or less opposed 
to slavery, saw in it a system so subversive of the 
rights of man that no just government should tol- 
erate it. That was reserved for a later genera- 
tion, and even that was slow to learn. To the 
fathers it was, at worst, only an unfortunate and 
unhappy social condition, which it would be well 
to be rid of if this could be done without too much 
sacrifice ; but otherwise, to be submitted to, like 
any other misfortune. 

While it did exist, however, Madison believed 
it should be protected, though not encouraged, as 
a Southern interest. The question resolved itself 
into one of expediency, — of union or disunion. 
What disunion would be, he knew, or thought he 
knew. Perhaps he was mistaken. Disunion, had 
it come then, might have been the way to a true 
union. " We are so weak," said C. C Pinckney, 
" that by ourselves we could not form a union 
strong enough for the purpose of effectually pro- 
tecting each other. Without union with the other 
States, South Carolina must soon fall." But he 
8 



114 



JAMES MADISON. 



was careful to say this at home, not in Philadel- 
phia. In the convention, Madison wrote a month 
after it adjourned, " South Carolina and Georgia 
were inflexible on the point of the slaves." What 
was to be the union which that inflexibility car- 
ried, was not foreseen. It was the children's 
teeth that were to be set on edge. 



CHAPTER IX. 

ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 

Madison's labors for the Constitution did not 
cease when the convention adjourned, although 
he was not at that moment in a hopeful frame of 
mind in regard to it. Within a week of the ad- 
journment he wrote to Jefferson: "I hazard an 
opinion, that the plan, should it be adopted, will 
neither effectually answer its national object, nor 
prevent the local mischiefs which excite disgusts 
against the state governments." 

But this feeling seems to have soon passed 
away. Perhaps, when he devoted himself to a 
careful study of what had been done, he saw, in 
looking at it as a whole, how just and true it was 
in its fair proportions. He now diligently sought 
to prove how certainly the Constitution would an- 
swer its purpose; how wisely all its parts were 
adjusted ; how successfully the obstacles to a per- 
fect union of the States had been, as he thought, 
overcome; how carefully the rights of the sepa- 
rate States had been guarded, while the needed 
general government would be secured. Whether 
there should be an American nation or not de- 



'VJ 



^-J 



116 JAMES MADISON. 

pended, as be had believed for years, upon 
whether a national Constitution could be agreed 
upon. Now that it was framed he believed that 
upon its adoption depended whether there should 
be, or should not be, a nation. In September, as 
he wrote to Jefferson, he was in doubt; in Febru- 
ary he wrote to Pendleton: "I have for some 
time been persuaded that the question on which 
the proposed Constitution must turn is the simple 
one, whether the Union shall or shall not be 
continued. There is, in my opinion, no middle 
ground to be taken." 

Those who would have called a second conven- 
tion to revise the labors of the first had no sympa- 
thy from him. He not only doubted if the work 
could be done so well again ; he doubted if it 
could be done at all. With him, it was this Con- 
stitution or none. " Every man," he said in "The 
Federalist," referring to a picture he had just 
drawn of the perils of disunion, — "every man 
who loves peace, every man who loves his country, 
every man who loves liberty, ought to have it ever 
before his eyes, that he may cherish in his heart 
a due attachment to the Union of America, and 
be able to set a due value on the means of preserv- 
ing: it." This " means " was the Constitution. 

Of the eighty papers of " The Federalist " he 
wrote twenty-nine ; Hamilton writing forty-six, 
and Jay only five. These famous essays, of wider 
repute than any other American book, are yet 






ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 117 

more generally accepted upon faith than upon 
knowledge. But at that time, when the new Con- 
stitution was in the mind and on the tongue of 
every thoughtful man, they were eagerly read as 
they followed each other rapidly in the columns 
of a New York newspaper. They were an ar- 
mory, wherein all who entered into the contro- 
versy could find such weapons as they could best 
handle. What governments had been, what gov- 
ernments ought to be, and what the political 
union of these American States would be under 
their new Constitution, were questions on which 
the writers of these papers undertook to answer 
all reasonable inquiries, and to silence all cavils. 
Madison would undoubtedly have written more 
than his two fifths of them, had he not been called 
upon early in March to return to Virginia; for the 
work was of the deepest interest to him, and the 
popularity of the papers would have stimulated to 
exertion one as indolent as he was industrious. 

But the canvass for the election of delegates to 
the Constitutional Convention of Virginia called 
him home. He bad been nominated as the repre- 
sentative of his county, and his friends had urged 
him to return before the election, for there was 
reason to fear that the majority was on the wrong 
side. Henry, Mason, Randolph, Lee, and others 
among the most influential men of Virginia, were 
opposed to the Constitution. There must be 
somebody in the convention to meet strong men 



118 JAMES MADISON'. 

like these, and Madison was urged to take the 
stump and canvass for his own election. Even 
this he was willing to do at this crisis, if need be, 
though he said it would be at the sacrifice of every 
private inclination, and of the rule which hitherto 
from the beginning of his public career he had 
strictly adhered to, — never to ask, directly or in- 
directly, for votes for himself. 

It is quite possible, even quite probable, that 
Mr. Madison had little of that gift which has al- 
ways passed for eloquence, and is, indeed, elo- 
quence of a certain kind. If we may trust the 
reports of his contemporaries, though he wanted 
some of the graces of oratory, he was not wanting 
in the power of winning and convincing. His ar- 
guments were often, if not always, prepared with 
care. If there was no play of fancy, there was no 
forgetfulness of facts. If there was lack of imag- 
ination, there was none of historical illustration, 
when the subject admitted it. If manner was for- 
gotten, method was not. His aim was to prove 
and to hold fast ; to make the wrong clear, and to 
put the right in its place ; to appeal to reason, not 
to passion, nor to prejudice ; to try his cause by 
the light of clear logic, hard facts, and sound 
learning; to convince his hearers of the truth, as 
he believed in it, not to take their judgment cap- 
tive by surprise with harmonious modulation and 
grace of movement. Not his neighbors only, but 
the most zealous of the Federalists of the State, 



ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 119 

sent him to the convention. It was there that 
such eloquence as he possessed was peculiarly 
needed. The ground was to be fought over inch 
by inch, and with antagonists whom it would be 
difficult, if not impossible, to beat. There was to 
be contest over every word of the Constitution 
from its first to its last. "• Give me leave," cried 
Patrick Henry in his opening speech, " to demand 
what right had they to say ' We the people ' in- 
stead of ' We the States ? '" He began at the be- 
ginning. It was the gage of the coming battle ; 
the defenders were challenged to show that any 
better union than that already in existence was 
needed, and that in this new Constitution a better 
union was furnished. 

As month after month passed away while the 
Constitution was before the people for adoption, 
the anxiety of the Federalists grew, lest the requi- 
site nine States should not give their assent. But 
when eight were secured there was room to hope 
even for unanimity, if Virginia should come in as 
the ninth. Should she say Yes, the Union might 
be perfect ; for the remaining States would be al- 
most sure to follow her lead. But should she say 
No, the final result would be doubtful, even if the 
requisite nine should be secured by the acquies- 
cence of one of the smaller States. This answer 
could not, of course, depend altogether upon one 
man, but it did depend more upon Madison than 
upon anybody else. 



120 JAMIS MADraON. 

The convention was in session nearly a month 
At the end of a fortnight he was not hopefuL 
The business," he wrote to Washington, " is in 
tlie most ticklish state that can be imagined. 
The majority will certainly be very small, on 
- whatever s,de it may finally lie ; and I dare not j 
encourage much expectation that it will be on the 
favorable side." But his fears stimulated rather 
than discouraged him. He was always on his 
feet; always ready to meet argument with argu- 
ment; always prompt to appeal from passion to 
reason; quick to brush aside mere declamation, 
and to bring (he minds of his hearers back to a 
calm consideration of how much was at stake and 
of the weight of tlie responsibility resting on that 
convention. Others were no less earnest and dili- 
gent than he ; but he was easily chief, and the 
burden and heat of the day fell mainly upon him. 
Jr'robably when the convention assembled the ma- 
jority were opposed to the Constitution • but its 
adoption was carried at last by a vote of eighty- 
nine to seventy-iiine. Thenceforth opposition in 
the remaining States was hopeless. 

New Hampshire _ though the fact was not 
known m Virginia — preceded that State by a 
tew days in accepting the Constitution, so that 
the requisite nine were secured before the conven- 
tion at Richmond came to a decision. But it was 
her decision, nevertheless, that really settled, so 
tar as can be seen now, the question of a perma- 



ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 121 

nent Union. Had the vote of Virginia been the 
other way it is not likely that Hamilton would 
have carried New York, or that North Carolina 
and Rhode Island would have finally decided not 
to be left in solitude outside. What the history 
of the nine united States only, with four disunited 
States among them, might have been, it is impos- 
sible to know, and quite useless to conjecture. 
The conditions which some of the States attached 
to the act of adoption ; the addition of a Bill of 
Rights ; proposed amendments to the Constitu- 
tion ; and the suggestion of submitting it to a sec- 
ond convention, were matters of comparatively 
little moment, when the majority of ten delegates 
was secured at Richmond. These were questions 
that could be postponed. '' The delay of a few 
years," Madison wrote to Jefferson, "will assuage 
the jealousies which have been artificially created 
by designing men, and will at the same time point 
out the faults which call for amendment." 

Immediately after the adjournment of the Rich- 
mond Convention he returned to New York, where 
the Confederate Congress was still in session. 
That body had little to do now but decide upon 
the time and place of the inauguration of the 
new government. Madison had entered upon his 
thirty-eighth year, and we get an interesting 
glimpse of him as he appeared at this time of his 
life to an intelliojent foreio-ner. " Mr. Warville 
Brissot has just arrived here," he wrote to Jeffer- 



122 JAMES MADISON. 

son in August, 1788. This was Brlssot de War- 
ville, a Frenchman of the new philosophy, — > 
whose head, nevertheless, his compatriots cut off, 
a few years later, — then traveling in America to 
observe the condition and progress of the new Re- 
public. His tour extended to nearly all the 
States; he met with most of the distinguished 
men of the country ; and he made a careful and 
intelligent use of his many opportunities for ob- 
servation. On his return to France he wrote an 
entertaining volume, — " New Travels in the 
United States of America," — still to be found in 
some old libraries. What he says of Madison is 
worth repeating, not only for the impression he 
made upon an observant stranger, but as the evi- 
dence of the contemporary estimate of his charac- 
ter and reputation, which De Warville must have 
gathered from others. 

" The name of Madison," he writes, " celebrated in 
America, is well known in Europe by the merited eulo- 
gium made of him by his countryman and friend, Mr. 
Jefferson. 

"Though still young, he has rendered the greatest 
services to Virginia, to the American Confederation, 
and to liberty and humanity in general. He contrib- 
uted much, with Mr. White, in reforming the civil and 
criminal codes of his country. He distinguished him- 
self particularly in the convention for the acceptation of 
the new federal system. Virginia balanced a long time 
in adhering to it. Mr. Madison determined to it the 



ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 123 

members of the convention, by bis eloquence and logic. 
This Republican appears to be about thirty-eight years 
of age. He had, when I saw him, an air of fatigue ; 
perhaps it was the effect of the immense labors to which 
he has devoted himself for some time past. His look 
announces a censor, his conversation discovers the man 
of learning, and his reserve was that of a man con- 
scious of his talents and of his duties. 

" During the dinner, to which he invited me, they 
spoke of the refusal of North Carolina to accede to the 
new Constitution. The majority against it was one 
hundred. Mr. Madison believed that this refusal would 
have no weight on the minds of the Americans, and 
that it would not impede the operations of Congress. I 
told him that though this refusal might be regarded as a 
trifle in America, it would have great weight in Eu- 
rope ; that they would never inquire there into the mo- 
tives which dictated it; nor consider the small conse- 
quence of this State in the confederation ; that it would 
be regarded as a germ of division, calculated to retard 
the operations of Congress; and that certainly this idea 
would prevent the resurrection of American credit. 

" Mr. Madison attributed this refusal to the attach- 
ment of a great part of the inhabitants of that State to 
their paper money and their tender act. He was much 
inclined to believe that this disposition would not remain 
a long time." 

In October the Virginia Assembly met. Two 
thirds of its members were opposed to the new 
Constitution, and at their head was Patrick 
Henry, his zeal against it not in the least abated 



124 JAMES MADISON. 

because he had been defeated in the late con- 
vention. The acceptance of the Constitution by 
that representative body could not be recalled. 
But the Assembly could, at least, protest against 
it, and was led by Henry to call upon Congress to 
convene a second national convention to do over 
again the work of the first. The legislature was 
to elect senators for the first Senate under the 
new government ; and it was also to divide the 
State into districts for its representation in the 
lower House of Congress. In ordinary fairness, 
as the State had, in a popular convention, so re- 
cently accepted the Constitution, the party then 
in the majority was entitled to at least one of the 
representatives in the Senate. But Henry nom- 
inated both, and could command votes enough to 
elect them. In modern party usage this would 
seem quite unobjectionable ; indeed, a modern pol- 
itician who should not use such an advantage for 
his party would be considered as unfit for practi- 
cal politics. But a hundred years ago it was 
thought sharp practice, and a fair proportion of 
Henry's partisans refused to be bound by it. One 
of Henry's nominees was elected by a majority of 
twenty over Madison ; but in the case of the other 
that majority was reduced more than half, and a 
change of five more votes would have elected 
Madison. 

He had, however, neither expected nor wished 
to be sent to the Senate, while he did hope to be 



ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 125 

elected to the House of Representatives. The 
Senate was intended to be the more dignified 
body, requiring in its members a certain style of 
living for which wealth was indispensable. Mad- 
ison had not the means to give that kind of social 
support to official position ; but he could afford to 
belong to that body where a member was not the 
less respectable because his whole domestic estab- 
lishment might be a bachelor's room in a board- 
ing-house. 

Virginia was, as he wrote to Washington, " the 
only instance among the ratifying States in which 
the politics of the legislature are at variance with 
the sense of the people, expressed by their repre- 
sentatives in convention." This had enabled 
Henry and a majority of his friends to elect sen- 
ators who, representing " the politics of the legis- 
lature," did not represent " the sense of the peo- 
ple " in regard to the national Constitution. But 
in the election of members of the House of Rep- 
resentatives, the sense of the people was to be 
again appealed to, and a new way must be de- 
vised for asserting the supremacy of legislative 
power. The cleverness of Elbridge Gerry of 
Massachusetts, many years later, under similar 
circumstances, introduced a new word into the 
language of the country, and, it was supposed 
at the time, a new device in American politics. 
But what has since been known as " Gerryman- 
dering " was really the invention of Patrick 



126 JAMES MADISON. ' 

Henry. This method of arranging counties into 
congressional districts in accordance with their 
political affinities, without regard to their geo- 
graphical lines, Henry attempted to do with Mr. 
Madison's own county. By joining it to distant 
counties it was expected that an anti-Federal ma- 
jority would be secured large enough to insure his 
defeat. The attempt to elect him to the Senate 
was, Madison wrote to Jefferson, " defeated by 
Mr. Henry, who is omnipotent in the present leg- 
islature." He adds that Henry " has taken equal 
pains, in forming the counties into districts for 
the election of representatives, to associate with 
Orange such as are most devoted to his politics 
and most likely to be swayed by the prejudices 
excited against me." The scheme, however, was 
unsuccessful, perhaps partly because of the indig- 
nation which so dishonorable a measure to defeat 
a political opponent excited throughout the State. 
Madison entered upon an active canvass of liis 
district against James Monroe, who had been 
nominated as a moderate anti-Federalist, and de- 
feated him. It was winter-time, and in the ex- 
posure of some of his long rides his ears were 
frozen. In later life he sometimes laughingly 
pointed to the scars of these wounds received, he 
said, in the service of his country. 

Thus Henry's '^ Gerrymander," like many an- 
other useful and curious device, brought neither 
profit nor credit to the original inventor. Had 



ADOPTION OF THE CONSTITUTION. 127 

Henry acted in the broader spirit of the modern 
politician, who sees that he serves himself best 
who serves his party best, he would have disposed 
of every Federal county in the State as he dis- 
posed of Orange. As it was, he only aroused a 
good deal of indignation and defeated himself by 
openly aiming to gratify his personal resentments. 
Had he scattered his shot for the general good of 
the party he would, perhaps, have brought down 
his particular bird. 



CHAPTER X. 

THE FIEST CONGRESS. 

The Confederate Congress, at its final session 
in 1788, had jBxed the time for the election of 
President and Vice-President under the Constitu- 
tion, and the time and place for the meeting of 
the first Congress of the new government. The 
day appointed was the first Wednesday of the fol- 
lowing March, and as that date fell on the fourth 
of the month, a precedent was established which 
has ever since been observed in the installation of 
a new President. The place was not so easily 
determined. The choice lay between New York 
and Philadelphia, and the struggle was prolonged, 
not because the question of the temporary seat of 
government was of much moment, but because of 
the influence the decision might have upon the 
future settlement of the permanent place for the 
capital. 

No quorum of the new Congress was present at 
New York on March 4, 1789, and neither House 
was organized until Ciirly in April. On the 23d, 
AYashington arrived ; and on the 30th he took the 
oath of office as first President of the United 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 129 

States, standing on the balcony of Federal Hall, 
at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets, a site 
now occupied by another building used as the sub- 
treasury. A week before, when the ceremonies 
proper for such an occasion were a subject of dis- 
cussion in Congress, the question of fitting titles 
for the President and Vice-President came up for 
consideration. It was decided that when the Pres- 
ident arrived the Vice-President should meet him 
at the door of the Senate Chamber, lead him to 
the chair, and then, in a formal address, inform 
him that the two Houses were ready to witness 
the administration of the oath of office. " Upon 
this," says John Adams, in a letter written three 
years afterward, " I arose in my place and asked 
the advice of the Senate, in what form I should 
address him, whether I should say, ' Mr. Wash- 
ington,' ' Mr. President,' ' Sir,' ' May it please 
your Excellency,' or what else? I observed that 
it had been common while he commanded the 
army to call him 'His Excellency,' but I was free 
to own it would appear to me better to give him 
no title but ' Sir,' or ' Mr. President,' than to put 
him on a level with a governor of Bermuda, or 
one of his own ambassadors, or a governor of any 
one of our States." 

Thereupon the question went to a conference 
committee of both Houses, who reported that no 
other title would be proper for either President 
or Vice-President, at any time, than these which 



130 JAMES MADISON. 

were given by the Constitution. To this report 
the Senate disagreed and appointed a new com- 
mittee. This proposed that the President should 
be called, " His Highness, the President of the 
United States, and Protector of their Liberties." 
When wise men are absurd they presume on their 
prerogative. The Senate accepted the report, but 
the House had the good sense to reject it, consent- 
ing, however, to leave the question in abeyance. 
On these proceedings Mr. Madison thus com- 
mented in a letter to Jefferson : — 

" My last inclosed copies of the President's inaugural 
speech, and the answer of the House of Representa- 
tives. I now add the answer of the Senate. It will 
not have escaped you that the former was addressed 
with a truly republican simplicity to George Washing- 
ton, President of the United States. The latter follows 
the example, with the omission of the personal name, 
but without any other than the constitutional title. The 
proceeding on this point was, in the House of Represen- 
tatives, spontaneous. The imitation by the Senate was 
extorted. The question became a serious one between 
the two Houses. J. Adams espoused the cause of titles 
with great earnestness. His friend, R. H. Lee, al- 
though elected as a republican enemy to an aristocratic 
Constitution, was a most zealous second. The projected 
title was, His Highness the President of the United 
States and the Protector of their Liberties. Had the 
project succeeded, it would have subjected the President 
to a severe dilemma, and given a deep wound to our in. 
fant government." 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 131 

Washington has sometimes been accused of 
wishing for the title of "His Highness," and of 
having suggested it. Had this been true, Madi- 
son would have been certain to know it, and he 
was quite incapable of asserting in that case that 
such a title would have been to the President " a 
severe dilemma." About Mr. Adams he was per- 
haps mistaken, as he might easily have been, since 
he was not a member of the Senate and probably 
heard only a confused report of how the question 
was brought before that bod}^ As Mr. Adams's 
letter, quoted just now, shows, he regarded the 
charge as a calumny and resented it. He gave 
them, according to his own statement, no other 
opinion than that he preferred " Sir," or " Mr. 
President," as a more proper address than " Ex= 
cellency," a title then, as now, pertaining to gov- 
ernors of States. He- probably took no further 
part in the debate, but it is not impossible that he 
may in private have avowed a preference for some 
other and higher title than either " Mr. Presi- 
dent " or " Your Excellency." " For," he said in 
the explanatory letter to his friend, " I freely own 
that I think decent and moderate titles, as distinc- 
tions of oflBces, are not only harmless, but useful 
in society ; and that in this country, where I know 
them to be prized by the people as well as their 
magistrates as highly as by any people or any 
magistrates in the world, I should think some dis- 
tinction between the magistrates of the national 



132 JAMES MADISON. 

government and those of the state governments 
proper.*" A distinction might be proper enough 
if there were to be any titles whatever ; but cer- 
tainly they were the wiser who preferred good j 
home-spun to threadbare old clothes. Had rags 
of that sort been made a legal uniform it is almost 
appalling to reflect upon the absurdities to which 
the national fondness for titles would have carried 
us. 

From March 4 to April 1, though the House of 
Representatives met daily, there were not mem- 
bers enough present to make a quorum. The first 
real business brought before the House, except 
that relating to its organization, was introduced 
by Madison, two days after the inauguration. It 
was a proposition to raise a revenue by duties on 
imports, and by a tonnage duty on all vessels, 
American and foreign, bringing goods, wares, or 
merchandise into the United States. The essen- 
tial weakness of the late Confederacy was, first of 
all, to be remedied by uniform rules for the regu- 
lation of trade. Revenue must be provided for 
the support of government, and that in a way 
which should not be oppressive to the people. 
Commerce, Mr. Madison said, "ought to be as 
free as the policy of nations will admit ; " but 
government must be supported, and taxes, the 
least burdensome and most easily collected, are 
those derived from duties on imports. He agreed, 
however, as he said on the second day of the de« 



TEE FIRST CONGRESS. 133 

bate, with those who would so adjust the duties 
on foreign goods as to protect the "infant manu- 
factories" of the country. With little interrup- 
tion this subject was debated for the first six 
weeks of the opening session of the First Congress. 
No other could have been hit upon to test so thor- 
oughly the strength of the new bond of union. 
It was to brush aside all those trade regulations in 
the several States which each had hitherto thought 
essential to its prosperity. Every interest in the 
country was to be considered, and their different, 
sometimes opposing, claims to be reconciled. 

New England was sure that, should the tax on 
molasses be too high, the distilleries would be shut 
up, and a great New England industry destroyed. 
Nor would the injury stop there. The fisheries, 
as well as the distilleries, would be ruined. For 
three fifths of the fish put up for the West Indies 
could find no market anywhere else ; and a market 
existed there only because molasses was taken in 
exchange. A prohibitory duty on that article, 
or a duty that should seriously interfere with its 
importation, would well-nigh destroy the fisheries. 
What then would become of the nursery of Amer- 
ican seamen ? With no seamen there would be 
no ship-building. What sadder picture than this 
of a New England without rum, without codfish, 
without seamen, and without ships. One can 
easily conceive that even in that restrained and dig- 
nified First Congress there was no want of serious 



134 JAMES MADISON. 

and alarmed expostulation, and even some threat- 
ening talk from such men as the tranquil Good- 
hue, the thoughtful and scholarly Ames, and the 
impulsive Gerry. 

Then the South, for her part, was alarmed lest, 
among other things, too high a tonnage duty 
should leave her tobacco, her rice, and indigo rot- 
ting in the fields and warehouses for want of ships 
to take them to market. She had no ships of her 
own and could have none, and she invited the 
ships of the rest of the world to come for her 
products and bring in return all she needed for 
her own consumption. The picture of the possi- 
ble ruin of New England was as nothing to that 
of the Southern planter scanning the horizon with 
weary eyes, in vain, for the sight of a sail, while 
behind him was a dangerous crowd of hungry 
blacks with nothing to do. That desolation seemed 
complete to the southernmost States when it was 
also proposed to levy a tax of ten dollars upon 
every slave imported. In short, the whole sub- 
ject bristled with difficulties. The problem was 
nothing more nor less than how to tax everything, 
and at the same time convince everybody that the 
scheme was for the general good, while nobody's 
special interests were sacrificed. The " infant 
industries," to which Mr. Madison alluded, really 
received no special consideration in the final ad- 
justment, and they were too feeble then even to 
cry for nursing. They have grown stronger since 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 135 

tbougli they are " infants " still ; and they should 
never cease to be grateful to him who, however 
unwittingly, gave them a name to live by for a 
hundred years. 

But the most remarkable part of the debate was 
that upon the proposition of Mr. Parker of Vir- 
ginia, to impose a duty upon the importation of 
slaves. Could the progress of events have been 
foreseen, that proposal might have been regarded 
as meant to protect an '' infant industry " of the 
northernmost slave States. But the wildest imag- 
ination then could not conceive of the domestic 
slave-trade of a few years later, when a chief 
source of the prosperity of Virginia would be her 
virgintial crop of young men and women to be 
shipped for New Orleans and a market. But Mr. 
Parker had no ulterior motive when he avowed 
his regret that the Constitution had failed to pro- 
hibit the importation of slaves from Africa, and 
hoped that the duty he proposed would prevent, 
in some degree, a traffic which he pronounced " ir- 
rational and inhuman." It would have been dif- 
ficult to have found a Virginian of that day who 
would not have taken down his shot-gun on hear- 
ing that there were miscreants prowling about his 
kitchen doors in the hope of buying up the strong- 
est young people of his household for export to 
the Southwest. 

Judging from the imperfect report of the debate 
upon the subject, it would seem that the bargain 



136 JAMES MADISON. 

relative to the slave-trade, made in the Constitu- 
tional Convention of two years before between 
New England and the two southernmost States, 
might still hold good. Or there may have been a 
new bargain ; or, perhaps, both sides trusted to a 
tacit recognition of the eternal fitness of things, 
and made common cause where legislation threat- 
ened at the same time the distillery and the slave- 
ship.i ^^ g^j^y j.r^|^g ^\^q cxtrcmc Southerners 
expressed surprise at the audacity which would 
disturb a compromise of the Constitution ; the 
extreme Northerners deprecated it as quite un- 
called for in any consideration of the subject of 
revenue. The principle of Mr. Parker's motion, 
Mr. Sherman of Connecticut thought, was to cor- 

1 Eleven years afterward, when the question of prohibiting the 
carrying on the slave-trade from American ports came up, one 
John Brown of Rhode Island said in Congress, " Our distilleries 
and manufactories were all lying idle for want of an extended com- 
merce. He had been well informed that on those coasts [African] 
New England rum was much preferred to the best Jamaica spir- 
its, and would fetch a better price. Why should it not be sent 
there, and a profitable return be made ? Why should a heavy 
fine and imprisonment [of slave-traders] be made the penalty for 
carrying on a trade so advantageous?" Sixty years later still, 
there was another Brown in Providence, Khode Island, who was 
a member of the Committee of the Kansas Aid Society of New 
England. He was about to withdraw from it for want of time to 
attend to its duties, — had, indeed, actually sent in his resignation, 
— when news came of the doings of another John Brown at 
Harper's Ferry. The resignation was instantly recalled, with the 
remark that it was not a time for Browns to seem to be backward 
on the question of slavery. Such is the irony of coincidence in 
names. 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 137 

rect a moral evil ; the principle of the bill before 
the House was to raise a revenue. At some other 
time he would be willing to consider the question 
of taxing the importation of negroes on the ground 
of humanity and policy ; but it was a sufficient 
reason with him for not admitting it as an object 
of revenue that the burden would fall upon tAVO 
States only. Fisher Ames of Massachusetts could 
only take counsel of his conscience. From his 
soul, he said, he detested slavery ; and — forget- 
ting, apparently, that this tax was provided for by 
the Constitution — he doubted whether imposing 
it '' would not have the appearance of authorizing 
the practice " of trading in slaves. This was his 
reason for wishing to postpone the subject. But 
Mr. Livermore of New Hampshire was more in- 
genious still. If the imported negroes were goods, 
wares, or merchandise, they would come within the 
title of the bill, and be taxed under the general 
rule of five per centum, which would be about the 
same rate as ten dollars a head ; but if they were 
not goods, wares, or merchandise, then such im- 
portation could not properly be included in the 
consideration of the question of a revenue from 
duties on such articles of trade. 

Mr. Madison came to the help of his colleague, 
and brushed aside the sophistries of the New Eng- 
land allies of the slave-traders. If there were 
anything wanting in the title of the bill to cover 
this particular duty, it was easy to add it. If the 



138 JAMES MADISON. 

question was not one of taxation because it was 
one of humanity, it would be quite as difi&cult to 
deal with it under any other bill for levying a 
duty as under this. If the tax seemed unjust be- 
cause it bore heavily upon a single class, that 
would be a good reason for remitting many taxes 
which there was no hesitation in imposing. If 
ten dollars seemed a heavy duty, a little calcula- 
tion would show that it was only about the pro- 
posed ad valorem duty of five per centum on most 
other importations. " It is to be hoped," he added, 
" that by expressing a national disapprobation 
of this trade we may destroy it, and save our- 
selves from reproaches, and our posterity the im- 
becility ever attendant on a country filled with 
slaves." '' If there is any one point," he contin- 
ued, " in which it is clearly the policy of this na- 
tion, so far as we constitutionally can, to vary the 
practice obtaining under some of the state gov- 
ernments, it is this. ... It is as much the inter- 
est of Georgia and South Carolina as of any in the 
Union. Every addition they receive to their num- 
ber of slaves tends to weaken and render them less 
capable of self-defense. ... It is a necessary 
duty of the general government to protect every 
part of the empire against danger, as well internal 
as external. Everything, therefore, which tends 
to increase this danger, though it may be a local 
affair, yet, if it involves national expense or safety, 
becomes of concern to every part of the Union, and 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 139 

is a proper subject for the consideration of those 
charged with the general administration of the 
government." No Northern man, except Elbridge 
Gerry of Massachusetts, supported this measure ; 
and none from the Southern States, except three 
of the Virginia members, with Madison leading. 
As the foreign slave-trade was protected in the 
Constitution for twenty years by a bargain be- 
tween the two southernmost States and New Eng- 
land ; so now the same influence staved off the 
imposition of the tax which was a part of the con- 
sideration to be given for that constitutional pro- 
tection of the trade. It is not a creditable fact ; 
but it is, nevertheless, a fact and a representative 
one in the history of the United States. And it 
is to Madison's great honor that he had neither 
part nor lot in it. 

After six weeks of earnest debate, an amicable 
and satisfactory agreement was made to impose a 
moderate duty upon pretty much everything im- 
ported, except slaves from Africa. It was liter- 
ally a tariff for revenue ; but it was a settlement 
that settled nothing definitely, except that the 
provision of the Constitution for a tax of ten dol- 
lars^ on imported slaves should be a dead letter. 
Thenceforth the policy of free trade was estab- 
lished, so far as African slaves were concerned, till 
the traffic was supposed to cease by constitutional 
limitation and Act of Congress in 1808.^ 

1 The subsequent legislation on this subject is a curious exem- 



140 JAMES MADISON. 

The determination to protect the commercial 
interests of the country, beyond the point of mere 
revenue, was more manifest in fixing the rate of 
duty upon tonnage than in duties upon importa- 
tions. It was generally agreed, after much debate, 
that American commerce had better be in Amer- 
ican hands, and a difference of twenty cents a ton 
was made between the tax upon domestic and that 
upon foreign ships, as a measure of protection to 
American shipping. Mr. Madison proposed to 
make it still larger, but the House w^ould only 
agree to increase it to forty cents on ships belong- 
ing to powers with which the United States had 

plification of the ingenuity with which any law obnoxious to the 
owners of slaves was got rid of, when it was clear that it could 
not be defeated by force of numbers. In 1806 a final attempt was 
made to impose the duty of ten dollars upon slaves imported, and 
a resolution passed in favor of it. This was referred to a com- 
mittee, with instructions to bring in a bill. A bill was reported 
and pushed so far as a third reading, when it was recommitted, 
which put it off for a year. When it next appeared it was a bill 
for the prohibition of the importation of slaves, in accordance 
with the constitutional provision that the traffic should cease in 
1808. The new question, after some debate, in which there was 
no allusion to the tax, was postponed for further consideration. 
But it never again came before the House. A month later, Febru- 
ary 13, 1807, a bill from the Senate, providing that the foreign 
slave-trade should cease on the first day of the following January, 
was received and immediately concurred in, and that seems to 
have been silently accepted as disposing of the whole subject. No 
tax was ever paid ; but the importation of slaves, notwithstand- 
ing the law to put an end to importation in 1808, continued at the 
rate, it was estimated, of about fifteen thousand a year. Proba- 
bly it never ceased altogether till the beginning of the Kebellion 
of 1860. 



I 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 141 

no treaties. The Senate, however, refused to ad- 
mit this distinction, and insisted that all foreign 
ships should be subject to the same tonnage duty 
without regard to existing treaties. The House 
assented, lest the bill should be lost altogether. 
This proposed differential duty on foreign vessels 
was as clearly aimed at Great Britain as if that 
power had been named in the bill. Nor, indeed, 
was there any attempt at concealment ; for it was 
openly avowed that America had no formidable 
rival except the English, who already largely con- 
trolled the commerce of the United States. In 
the debates and in the final decision of the ques- 
tion is shown clearly enough the difference of 
opinion and of feeling, which soon made the divid- 
ing line between the two great parties of the first 
quarter of a century mider the Constitution. No- 
body then foresaw how bitter that difference of 
party was to be, nor what disastrous consequences 
would follow it. 

Mr. Madison was among the most zealous of 
those who insisted upon a discrimination against 
Great Britain. He thought it should be made 
for the dignity no less than for the interest of the 
United States. He had no fear, he said, " of en- 
tering: into a commercial warfare with that na- 
tion." England, he believed, could do this coun- 
try no harm by any peaceful reprisals she could 
devise. She supplied the United States with no 
article either of necessity or of luxury that the 



142 JAMES MADISON. 

people of the United States could not manufacture 
for themselves. He called those " Anglicists " 
who did not agree with him, and who believed 
that it was in the power of Great Britain to hinder 
or to help immensely the prosperity of the United 
States. It was not of so much moment what 
America bought of England, as it was that Eng- 
land should consent to free trade with her colo- 
nies ; and on every account it was wiser to concili- 
ate than to defy Great Britain ; wiser to induce 
her to enter into a friendly commercial alliance, 
than to provoke her to retaliate upon the feeble 
commerce of this country, upon which she had so 
strong a grip. Madison had shown himself, before 
this time, half credulous of the charges of a lean- 
ing toward England and toward monarch}', made 
by those who wanted a congress of petty States, 
against those who wanted a strong national gov- 
ernment. If, however, there were Anglicism on 
one side, so there was quite as much Gallicism, if 
not a good deal more, on the other. In writing 
to Jefferson of the probability that the Senate 
would make no discrimination in the tonnage du- 
ties, he said that in that case " Great Britain will 
be quieted in the enjoyment of our trade, as she 
may please to regulate it, and France discouraged 
from her efforts at a competition, which it is not 
less our interest than hers to promote." What- 
ever may be thought of this first concession of 
the new government to England, it is quite as 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 143 

much the coming party leader as the statesman 
who sj)eaks here. It may not be doubted that he 
sincerely thought it to be, as he said, " impolitic, 
in every view that can be taken of the subject, to 
put Great Britain at once on the footing of the 
most favored nation." But the relation of Amer- 
ican interests to English interests was evidently 
already associated in his mind with the relations 
of France and England, so soon to be the absorb- 
ing question in American politics. 

The impost act was followed by others hardly 
less important in putting the new Constitution 
into operation under its first Congress. The di- 
rection of business seems, by common consent, 
to have been intrusted to Mr. Madison among 
the many able men of that body ; doubtless, be- 
cause of his thorough familiarity with the Consti- 
tution, and of his methodical ways. He was sure 
to bring things forward in their due order, to pro- 
vide judiciously for the more immediate needs. 
The impost bill secured the means to work with ; 
the next necessity was to organize the machinery 
to do the work. Resolutions to create the execu- 
tive departments of Foreign Affairs, of the Treas- 
ures and of War, were offered by Mr. Madison. 
These were required in general terms b}'' the Con- 
stitution, with a single officer at the head of each, 
to be appointed by the President "by and with 
the advice and consent of the Senate." The man- 
ner of the appointment of subordinate officers was 



144 JAMES MADISON. 

provided for by the Constitution, but the manner 
of their removal from office was not. Was the 
tenure of office to be good behavior ? Were the 
incumbents removable, with or without cause ? 
If the power of removal existed, did it vest in 
the power that appointed, that is, in the President 
and Senate conjointly, or in the President alone ? 

As the Constitution was silent, the question had 
to be settled on its own merits. With all the ar- 
guments that could be urged, either on one side or 
the other, we are familiar enough in our time, 
coming up as the question so often does in changes 
in state constitutions and municipal charters, and 
in the discussion of the necessity for civil service 
reform. There is this essential difference, how- 
ever, between now and then ; we know the mis- 
chiefs that come from the power of official re- 
moval, which were then only dimly apprehended. 
The power of removal from office belonged, Mr. 
Madison believed, rightfully to the Chief Magis- 
trate, and if, by some unhappy chance the wrong 
man should find his way to that position and abuse 
the power intrusted to him, " the wanton removal 
of meritorious officers would," he said, " subject 
the President to impeachment and removal from 
his own high trust." 

Lofty political principles like these may still be 
found in the platforms of modern political par- 
ties, — 
" The souls of them f umed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out." 



THE FIRST CONGEESS. 145 

But Mr. Madison believed, at least, that he be- 
lieved in them. There is in politics as in religion 
an accepted doctrine of justification by faith ; and 
this, perhaps, sustained him when, twelve years 
later, as Jefferson's Secretary of State, he learned 
from his chief that, as " Federalists seldom died 
and never resigned," party necessities must find a 
way of supplementing the law of nature. Jeffer- 
son was a little timid in applying the remedy, but 
Madison lived long enough to see Jackson boldly 
remove, in the course of his administration, about 
two thousand office-holders, whose places he wanted 
as rewards for his own political followers. From 
that time to this there has not been a President 
who might not, if Madison's doctrine was sound, 
have been impeached for a " wanton " abuse of 
power. 

Though the Constitution had been adopted by 
the States, it was not without objections by some /^^ 
of them. To meet these objections Mr. Madison 
proposed twelve amendments declaratory of cer- 
tain fundamental popular rights, which, it was 
thought by many persons, were not sufficiently 
guarded by the original articles. This, also, was 
left to him to do, no doubt because of his thor- 
oufrh knowledsre of the Constitution and of the 
points wherein it was still imperfect, as well as 
those wherein it had better not be meddled with. 
The amendments, as finally agreed to after long 
debate, were essentially those which he proposed, 
10 



146 JAMES MADISON. 

and in due time ten of them were ratified by the 
States. The two tliat were not accepted referred 
only to the number of representatives in the 
House, and to the pay of members of Cougress. 

It was hoped that the selection of a place for 
the permanent seat of government would be made 
by this Congress. There was much talk of the 
centres of wealth, of territory, and of population 
then, and of where such centres might be in the 
future. But the question was really a sectional 
one. The Northern members were accused of 
having made a bargain out of doors with the 
members of the Middle States. The bargain, 
however, was only this : that inasmuch as it was 
hopeless that the actual centre should be chosen 
as the site for a capital city, a place as near as 
possible to it should ^be insisted upon. The 
South, on the other hand, determined that the 
seat of government should be within the boun- 
daries of the Southern States. That was a fore- 
gone conclusion with them, that needed no bargain. 
The nearest navigable river to the centre of pop- 
ulation was the Delaware ; but the jealousy of 
New York stood in the way of any selection that 
favored Philadelphia. The Susquehanna was pro- 
posed. It empties into Chesapeake Bay. North 
of it was, as Mr. Sherman showed, a population 
of 1,400,000 ; and south of it 1,200,000. The 
South wanted the capital on the Potomac, not be- 
cause it was the centre of population then, but 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 147 

because it might be at some future time, from the 
growth of the West. On the other hand, it was 
insisted that the population south of the Potomac 
was then only 960,000, while north of it there 
were 1,680,000 people, and that it was no more 
accessible from the West than the Susquehanna 
was. To many members, moreover, this talk 
of the great future of the West seemed hardly 
worthy of consideration. It was "an unmeasur- 
able wilderness," and " when it would be settled 
was past calculation," Fisher Ames said. " It 
was," he added, " perfectly romantic to make this 
decision depend upon that circumstance. Proba- 
bly it will be near a century before these people 
will be considerable." He was nearer right when 
he said in the same speech "that trade and manu- 
factures will accumulate people in the Eastern 
States in proportion of five to three, compared 
with the Southern. The disproportion will, doubt- 
less, continue to be much greater than I have cal- 
culated. It is actually greater at present, for the 
climate and negro slavery are acknowledged to be 
unfavorable to population, so that husbandry as 
well as commerce and manufactures will give more 
people in the Eastern than in the Southern States." 
It was, however, finally resolved by the House 
^ that the permanent seat of the government of 
the United States ought to be at some convenient 
place on the banks of the river Susquehanna in 
the State of Pennsylvania;" and a bill accordingly 
Tvas sent to the Senate. 



148 JAMES MADISON: 

Had the Senate agreed to this bill, there are 
some luminous pages of American history that 
would never have been written ; for the progress 
of events would have taken quite another direc- 
tion had the influences surrounding the national 
capital for the first half of this century been 
Northern instead of Southern. But the Senate 
did not agree. For " the convenient place on the 
banks of the Susquehanna " it substituted ten 
miles square on the river Delaware, beginning 
one mile from Philadelphia and including the vil- 
lage of Germantown. To this amendment the 
House agreed, and there, but for Madison, the 
matter would have ended. He had labored earn- 
estly for the site on the Potomac ; but failing in 
that, lie hoped to postpone the question till the 
next session of Congress, when the representatives 
from North Carolina would be present. He moved 
a proviso that the laws of Pennsylvania should 
remain in force within the district ceded b}^ the 
State till Congress should otherwise provide by 
law. It seems to have been accepted without con- 
sideration, a single member only saying that he 
saw no necessity for it. At any rate, whether 
that was Mr. Madison's motive or not, time was 
gained, for it compelled the return of the bill to 
the Senate. This was on September 28, and the 
next day the session was closed by adjournment 
till the following January. 

When in that next session the bill came back 



THE FIRST CONGRESS. 149 

from the Senate to the House, a member from 
South Carolina said, in the course of debate, that 
"a Quaker State was a bad neighborhood for the 
South Carolinians." The Senate had also come 
to that conclusion, for the bill now proposed that 
the capital should be at Philadelphia for ten 
years only, and should then be removed to the 
banks of the Potomac. It was done, Madison 
wrote to Monroe, by a single vote, for two South- 
ern senators voted against it. But the two sena- 
tors from North Carolina were now present, and 
the majority of one was made sure of somehow. 

So much was gained by gaining time, and Mad- 
ison thought the passage of the bill through the 
House was possible, " but attended with great 
difficulties." Did he know how these difficulties 
were to be overcome ? *' If the Potomac suc- 
ceeds," he adds, " it will have resulted from a for- 
tuitous coincidence of circumstances which might 
never happen again." What the *' fortuitous co- 
incidence " was he does not explain ; but the term 
was a felicitous euphuism to cover up what in the 
blunter political language of our time is called 
*' log-rolling." 

The reader of this series of biographies is al- 
ready familiar with Hamilton's skillful barter of 
votes for the Potomac site of the cajDital in ex- 
change for votes in favor of his scheme for the as- 
sumption of the state debts. Madison seems not 
to have been ignorant of the progress of that bar- 



150 JAMES MADISON. 

gain, with whicli Jefferson was afterward so anx- 
ious to prove that he had nothing to do. Madison 
earnestly opposed the assumption of the state debts 
from first to last ; but, when he saw that the meas- 
ure was sure to pass the House, he wrote to Mon- 
roe : " I cannot deny that the crisis demands a 
spirit of accommodation to a certain extent. If 
the measure should be adopted, I shall wish it to 
be considered as an unavoidable evil, and possibly 
not the worst side of the dilemma." In other 
words, he was willing to assent silently to what 
he believed to be a great injustice to several of 
the States, provided that the bargain should be a 
gain to his own State. If Hamilton and Jeffer- 
son were sinners in this business, Madison will 
hardly pass for a saint. 



I 



CHAPTER XL 

NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 

Hamilton's famous report to the First Con- 
gress, as Secretary of the Treasury, was made at 
the second session in January, 1790. Near the 
close of the previous session a petition asking for 
some settlement of the public debt was received 
and referred to a committee of which Madison 
was chairman. The committee reported in favor 
of the petition, and the House accordingly called 
upon the Secretary to prepare a plan "for the 
support of the public credit." 

So far as Hamilton's funding scheme provided 
for that portion of the debt due to foreigners ifc 
was accepted without demur. There could be no 
doubt that there the ostensible creditor was the 
real creditor, who should be paid in full. The re- 
port assumed that this was equally true of the 
domestic debt. A citizen holding a certificate of 
the indebtedness of the government, no matter 
how he came by it, nor at what price, was entitled 
to payment at its face value. But here the ques- 
tion was raised, Was this ostensible creditor the 
sole creditor? Was he, whose necessities had 



152 JAMES MADISON. 

compelled him to part with the government's 
note of hand at a large discount when fall pay- 
ment was impossible, to receive nothing now when 
at last government was able to pay in full? Was 
it equity to let all the loss fall upon the original 
creditor, and all the gain go to him who had lost 
nothing originally, and had only assumed at small 
cost the risk of a profitable speculation? More- 
over it was charged, and not denied, that in some 
of these speculations there had been no risk what- 
ever ; and that so soon as the tenor of the report 
was known fast-sailing vessels were dispatched 
from New York to the Carolinas and Georgia to 
buy up public securities held by persons ignorant 
of their recent rapid rise in value. As hitherto 
they had been worth only about fifteen cents on 
the dollar ; as upon the publication of the Secre- 
tary's report they had risen to fifty cents on the 
dollar ; and as, if the Secretary's advice should be 
taken, the}^ would rise to a hundred cents on the 
dollar; it would be securing, what in the slang of 
the modern stock- exchange is called "a good 
thinsf," to send acrents into the rural districts in 
advance of the news to buy up government paper. 
" My soul rises indignant," exclaimed a member, 
" at the avaricious and moral turpitude which so 
vile a conduct displays." Nor on that point did 
anybody venture then to disagree with him 
openly. 
But besides the question as to who were in real- 



NATIONAL FINANCES.— SLAVERY. 153 

ity the public creditors, a doubt was also raised 
whether the debt ought to be paid in full to any- 
body. Every dollar of the foreign debt was for 
an actual dollar borrowed. But the domestic debt 
was not incurred to any large amount for money 
borrowed, but in payment for services, or for pro- 
visions and goods purchased, for w^hich double, or 
more than double, prices had been exacted by 
those who exchanged them for government paper. 
If the exigencies of war had compelled the govern- 
ment to promise to pay for fifty bushels of wheat 
the price of a hundred bushels, the creditor, now 
that the government was in a condition to redeem 
its promise, was not entitled in equity to receive 
more than the actual value of the fifty bushels at 
the time of the purchase. Moreover, it was con- 
tended, there was no injustice in such a settle- 
ment of the debt, for the war had been carried 
on and brought to a successful end, for the ben- 
efit of the creditor as well as of everybody else. 
The ai'gument was analogous in a measure to that 
used by a certain class of politicians in our time, 
who maintained that the bonds of the United 
States, bought at a discount for "greenbacks," 
during the late rebellion, should not be redeemed 
in gold when the war was over. 

The answer to all this was obvious. The na- 
tion must first be just by paying its debts to those 
who could present the evidence that they were its 
creditors. If, when that was done, it could afford 



154 JAMES MADISON, 

to be generous, it might, if so disposed, reimburse 
those who had lost by parting with the certificates 
of debt at a discount. The government could not 
in honor go behind its own contracts. The Con- 
stitution provided that " all debts and engage- 
ments, entered into before the adoption of this 
Constitution, shall be as valid against the United 
States under this Constitution as under the Con- 
federation." Here was a debt which the Confed- 
eration had contracted, and the Fedei-al Govern- 
ment had no more right " to impair the obligation 
of contracts " for its own benefit, than the sepa- 
rate States had ; and that they were expressly 
forbidden by the Constitution to do. 

Madison listened quietly day after day to the 
long and earnest debates upon the subject, and 
then advanced an entirely new proposition. Pie 
agreed with one party in maintaining the inviola- 
bility of contracts. The Confederacy had incurred 
a debt to its own citizens, which the new govern- 
ment had agreed to assume. But he also agreed 
with the other party that there was a question as 
to whom that debt was due. Were those who now 
held the certificates entitled to the payment of 
their face value, dollar for dollar, although the 
cost to them was only somewhere from fifteen to 
fifty cents on the dollar? It was true that the 
original contract was transferable, and these 
present creditors held the evidence of the trans- 
fer. But did that transfer entitle the holder to 



NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 155 

the full value without regard to the price paid for 
it ? Was there not in equity a reserved right in 
the original holder, who, having given a full 
equivalent for the debt, had only parted with the 
evidences of it, under the compulsion of his own 
poverty, and the inability of the government at 
that time to meet its obligations ? Was not this 
specially true in the case of the soldiers of the 
late war, to whose devotion and sacrifices the na- 
tion owed its existence ? 

Mr. Madison thought that an affirmative reply 
to the last two queries would present the true view 
of the case, and he proposed, therefore, to pay both 
classes of creditors — those who now held the evi- 
dence of indebtedness, acquired by purchase at 
no matter what price ; and those who had parted 
with that evidence without receiving the amount 
which the government had promised to pay for 
services rendered. It was not, however, to be ex- 
pected that the entire debt should be paid in full 
to both classes. That was bej^^ond the ability of 
the government. But it would be an equitable 
settlement, he contended, to pay the present hold- 
ers the highest price the certificates had ever 
reached, and to award the remainder to those who 
were the original creditors. 

This proposition received only thirteen votes out 
of forty-nine. Many of those opposed to it were 
quite ready to grant that it was hard upon the vet- 
erans of the war that they, who had received so 



156 JAMES MADISON. 

little and who had borne so much, should not now 
be recognized as creditors when at last the govern- 
ment was able to pay its debts. But the House 
could not indulge in sentimental legislation. That 
would be to launch the ship of state upon another 
sea of bankruptcy. There were in the hands of 
the people tens of millions of paper money not 
Tvortli at the current rate a cent on the dollar. If 
everybody who had lost was to be paid, the point 
would soon be reached where nobody would be 
paid at all. A limit must be fixed somewhere ; 
let it be at these certificates of debt which were 
the evidence of a contract made between the gov- 
ernment and its creditors. These could be paid, 
and they should be paid to those who were in law- 
ful possession of them. The law, if not the equity, 
of the case was clearly against Madison. That 
the government should be absolutely just to 
everybody who had ever trusted to it, and lost by 
it, was impossible. It was a bankrupt compelled 
to name its preferred creditors, and it named those 
whom it was in honor and law bound to take care 
of, and over whose claims there was, on the whole, 
the least shadow of doubt. That the loss should 
remain chiefly wnth the soldiers of the Revolution, 
and the gain fall chiefly to those who were shrewd 
enough, or had the means to speculate in the pub- 
lic funds, was a lamentable fact ; but to discrim- 
inate between them was not within the right of 
the government. That he would have had it dis- 



NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 157 

criminate was creditable to Madison's heart ; it 
was rather less creditable to bis head. 

Of course, underneath all this debate there lay 
other considerations than those merely of debtor 
and creditor, of moral and legal obligation, of pity 
for the soldiers, and of strict regard for the letter 
of a contract. Mr. Hamilton and his friends, 
it was said, were anxious to establish the public 
credit, not so much because they wished to kee^D 
faith with creditors, as because they wished to 
strengthen the government and build up their 
own party. The reply to these accusations was, 
that the other side, under pretense of consideration 
for the soldiers and others on whom the burden of 
the war had borne most heavily, concealed hostil- 
ity to the Constitution and a consolidated govern- 
ment. These were not reflections to be spoken of 
in debate, but they were not the less cherished, 
and gave to it piquancy and spirit. There was 
truth on both sides, without doubt. 

Though defeated in this measure Madison was 
not less determined in his opposition to the as- 
sumption of the debts of the States. Of these 
debts some States had discharged more than 
others ; and he complained, not without reason, of 
the injustice of compelling those which had borne 
their own burdens unaided to share in the obliga- 
tions which others had neglected. He was un- 
fortunate, however, in assuming a superiority for 
Virginia over some of the Eastern States, and 



158 JAMES MADISON. 

especial!}'" over Massachusetts, in services rendered 
in the struggle for independence. The compari- 
son provoked a call for official inquiry ; and that 
proved that Massachusetts alone had sent more 
men into the field during the war than all the 
Southern States together. It was not much to be 
wondered at, when this fact was considered, that 
the debt o£ Massachusetts should be larger than 
that of Virginia by 1800,000. The difPerence be- 
tween Virginia and South Carolina was the same, 
the truth being that the war had cost Massachu- 
setts more money to pay her soldiers for the gen- 
eral service, and South Carolina more to repel the 
enemy upon her own soil, than it had cost Virginia 
for either purpose. Massachusetts and South Car- 
olina were again found acting together, simply be- 
cause each of them had a debt — 84,000,000 — 
larger than tbat of any other State. The total 
debt of all the States was about $21,000,000 ; and 
as that of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, or Con- 
necticut, when added to the $8,000,000 of Mas- 
sachusetts and South Carolina, amounted to half, 
or more, of the whole sum, there was no difiiculty 
in forming a strong combination in favor of as- 
sumption. No combination, however, was strong 
enough to carry the measure on its own merits, 
notwithstanding its advocates attempted to defeat 
the funding of the domestic debt of the Federal 
Union unless the debts of the several States were 
assumed at the same time. 



NATIONAL FINANCES.- SLAVERY. 159 

The domestic debt, however, was at length pro- 
vided for, and the assumption of the debts of the 
States was rejected till that bargain, referred to 
in the preceding chapter, which gave to the South- 
ern States the permanent seat of government, was 
concluded. It would not have been difficult, prob- 
ably, to defeat that piece of political jobbery by 
a public exposure of its terms. Why Madison 
did not resort to it, if, as seems certain, he knew 
that such a bargain had been privately made, can 
only be conjectured. Perhaps he saw that Ham- 
ilton, who was applauded by his friends and de- 
nounced by his enemies for his clever manage- 
ment, had, after all, only made a temporary gain ; 
and that Jefferson, whose defense was that Ham- 
ilton had taken advantage of his ignorance and 
innocence, would not, had he not been short- 
sighted, have made any defense at all. For the 
assumption of the state debts by the general gov- 
ernment was only a distribution of a single local 
burden ; and this was a small price for Virginia 
and the other Southern States to pay for the per- 
manent possession of the federal capital. 

While these questions were pending another was 
thrown into the House, which was not disposed 
of for nearly two months. The debates upon it, 
Madison said in one of his letters, " were shame- 
fully indecent," though he thought the introduc- 
tion of the subject into Congress injudicious. The 
Yearly Meeting of Friends in New York and in 



160 JAMES MADISON. 

Pennsylvania sent a memorial against the con- 
tinued toleration of the slave-trade ; and this was 
followed the next day by a petition from the Penn- 
sylvania Society for the Promotion of the Aboli- 
tion of Slavery, signed by Benjamin Franklin as 
president, asking for a more radical measure. 

" They earnestly entreat," they said, " your serious 
attention to the subject of slavery ; that you will be 
pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to these 
unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom are de- 
graded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the gen- 
eral joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile 
subjection ; that you will devise means for removing 
this inconsistency from the character of the American 
people ; that you will promote mercy and justice to- 
wards this distressed race ; and that you will step to the 
very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging 
every species of traffic in the persons of our fellow-men." 

The words were probabl}^ Franklin's own, and 
as he died a few weeks after they were written, 
they may be considered as his dying words to his 
countrymen, • — counsel wise and merciful as his 
always was. 

A memorable debate followed the presentation 
of these memorials. Even in the imperfect re- 
port of it that has come down to us, the " shame- 
ful indecency " of which Madison speaks is visible 
enough. Franklin, venerable in years, exalted 
in character, and eminent above almost all the 
men of the time for services to his country, was 



NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 161 

sneered at for senility and denounced as disre- 
garding the obligations of the Constitution. But 
the wrath of the pro-slavery extremists was spe' 
cially aroused against the Society of Friends, and 
was unrestrained by any considerations of either 
decency or truth. In this respect the debate was 
the precursor of evQry contest in Congress upon 
the subject that was to follow for the coming 
seventy years. The Quakers were the represen- 
tative abolitionists of that day, and the measure 
of bitter and angry denunciation that was meted 
out to them was the same measure which, heaped 
up and overflowing, was poured out upon those 
who, in later times, took upon themselves the bur- 
den of the cause of the slave. The line of argu- 
ment, the appeals to prejudice, the disregard of 
facts and the false conclusions, the misrepresenta- 
tion of past history and the misapprehension of 
the future, the contempt of reason, of common 
sense, and common humanity, then laboriously and 
unscrupulously arrayed in defense of slavery, left 
nothing for the exercise of the ingenuity of mod- 
ern orators. A single difference only between 
the earlier and the later time is conspicuous ; the 
" plantation manners," as they were called five 
and twenty years ago^ which the Wises, the 
Brookses, the Barksdales, and the Priors of the 
modern South relied upon as potent w^eapons of 
defense and assault, were unknown in the earlier 

Congresses. 

11 



162 JAMES MADISON. 

Mr. Madison and some other members from the 
South, particularly those from Virginia, opposed 
the majority of their colleagues, who were unwill- 
ing that these memorials should be referred to a 
committee. " The true policy of the Southern 
members," Madison wrote to a friend, " was to 
have let the affair proceed with as little noise as 
possible, and to have made use of the occasion to 
obtifin, along with an assertion of the powers of 
Congress, a recognition of the restraints imposed 
by the Constitution." This in effect was done in 
the end, but not till near two months had passed, 
within which time the more violent of the South- 
ern members had ample opportunity to free their 
minds and exhaust the subject. The more these 
people talked the worse it was, of course, for their 
cause. Had Madison's moderate advice been ac- 
cepted then, and had that example been followed 
for the next sixty or seventy years, it is quite 
likely that the colored race would still be in bond- 
age in at least one half of the States. But there 
was never a more notable example of manifest 
destiny than the gradual but certain progress of 
the opposition to slavery ; for there never was a 
system, any attempt to defend which showed how 
utterly indefensible such a system must needs be. 
Every argument advanced in its favor was so 
manifestly absurd, or so shocking to the ordinary 
sense of mankind, that the more it was discussed 
the more widespread and earnest became the op« 



NATIONAL FINANCES.— SLAVERY. 163 

position. Had the slave-holders been wise they 
would never have opened their mouths upon the 
subject. But like the man possessed of the devil, 
they never ceased to cry, " Let me alone ! " And 
the more they cried the more there were who un- 
derstood where that cry came from. 

In one respect Mr. Madison declared that the 
memorial of the Friends demanded attention. If 
the American flag was used to protect foreigners 
in carrying on the slave-trade in other countries, 
that was a proper subject for the consideration of 
Congress. " If this is the case," he said, " is 
there any person of humanity that would not 
wish to prevent them ?" ^ But he recognized the 
limitations of the Constitution in relation to the 
importation of slaves into the United States, and 
the want of any authority in the letter of the 
Constitution, or of any wish on the part of Con- 
gress, to interfere with slavery in the States. On 
these points he would have a decisive declaration, 
without agitation, and with as little discussion as 

1 The most serious difficulty in the way of the final suppres- 
sion of the African slave-trade in the present century was, that 
it could be carried on without molestation in American bottoms, 
under the American flag. The ruling power in the United States, 
from 1787 to 1860, was never willing that their own cruisers 
should meddle with the slavers, and resented as an insult to the 
flag the search, by the cruisers of other powers, of any vessel 
under the American flag, though it might be absolutely certain 
that she had come straight from the coast of Africa, and that her 
" between-decks " was crowded full of negroes to be sold as slaves 
in Cuba. 



164 JAMES MADISON. 

possible, and there would have dropped the sub- 
ject. It only needed, he evidently thought, that 
everybody. North and South, should understand 
the Constitution to be a mutual agreement to let 
slavery altogether alone, when the bargain would 
be on both sides faithfully adhered to. 

This was all very well with the numerous per- 
sons who were quite indifferent to the subject, or 
who thought it very unreasonable in the blacks 
not to be quite willing to remain slaves a few 
hundred years longer. But there were two other 
classes to reckon with, and Mr. Madison was not 
much inclined to be patient with either of them. 
To let the subject alone was precisely what the 
hot-headed members from the South were incapa- 
ble of doing then, as they proved to be incapable 
of doing for the next seventy years. On the 
other hand, all the petitioners could really hope 
for was that there should be discussion. The gal- 
leries were crowded at those earliest debates, as 
they continued to be crowded on all such occa- 
sions in subsequent years. Many went to learn 
what could be said on behalf of slavery, who 
came away convinced that the least said the bet- 
ter. Agitation might disturb the harmony of the 
Union, which was Madison's dread ; it might lead 
to the death of an abolitionist, as it sometimes did 
in later times; but it was sure in the end to be 
the death of slavery, though its short-sighted de- 
fenders could never understand why. They could 



NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 165 

never be made to see that its most dangerous foes 
were the friends of its own household, who could 
not hold their tongues ; that for their case all 
wisdom was epitomized in the vulgar caution " to 
lie low and keep dark ; " that the exposure of the 
true character of slavery must needs be its de- 
struction, and that nothing so exposed it as any 
attempt to defend it. Slavery was quite safe 
under the Constitution, as Mr. Madison intimated, 
if its friends would only leave it there and claim 
no other protection. 

Advocates are never wanting in any court who 
believe that the most effective line of defense is to 
abuse the plaintiff. The Quakers, it was said, 
" notwithstanding their outward pretenses," had 
no "more virtue or religion than other people, 
nor perhaps so much." They had not made the 
Constitution, nor risked their lives and fortunes 
by fighting for their country. Why should they 
" set themselves up in such a particular manner 
against slavery ? " Did they not know that the 
Bible, not only allowed but commended it, " from 
Genesis to Revelation " ? That the Saviour had 
permitted it? That the Apostles, in spreading 
Christianity, had never preached against it ? That 
it had been — the illustration was not altogether a 
happy one — '' no novel doctrine since the days of 
Cain ? " The condition of these American slaves 
was said to be one of great happiness and com- 
fort ; yet almost in the same breath it was asserted 



166 JAMES MADISON. 

that to excite in their minds any hope of change 
would lead to the most disastrous consequences, 
and possibly to massacre. The memorialists were 
bidden to remember that, even if slavery " were 
an evil, it was one for which there was no rem- 
edy ; " for that reason the North had acquiesced 
in it ; "a compromise was made on both sides — 
we took each other with our mutual bad habits 
and respective evils, for better, for worse ; the 
Northern States adopted us with our slaves, and 
we adopted them with their Quakers." With- 
out such a compromise there could have been no 
Union, and any interference now with slavery by 
the government would end in a civil war. These 
people were meddling with what was none of their 
business, and exciting the slaves to insurrection. 
Yet how forbearing were the people of the South- 
ern States who, notwithstanding all this, " had 
not required the assistance of Congress to exter- 
minate the Quakers ! " 

This was not conciliatory. Those who had been 
disposed at the beginning to meet the petitions 
with a quiet reply that the subject was out of 
the jurisdiction of Congress, were now provoked 
to give them a much warmer reception. They 
could not listen patiently to the abuse of the 
Quakers, and, though they might acquiesce in 
the toleration of slavery, they were not inclined 
to have it crMmmed down their throats as a wise, 
beneficent, and consistent condition of society/ 



NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 167 

under a republican government. Even Madison, 
who at first was most anxious that nothing should 
be said or done to arouse agitation, w^hile acknowl- 
edging that all citizens might rightfully appeal to 
Congress for a redress of what they considered 
grievances, was moved at last to say that the me- 
morial of the Friends was " well worthy of con- 
sideration." While admitting that under the Con- 
stitution the slave-trade could not be prohibited 
for twenty years, " yet," he declared, " there are 
a variety of ways by which it [Congress] could 
countenance the abolition, and regulations might 
be made in relation to the introduction of [slav- 
ery] into the new States to be formed out of the 
western territory." 

Gerry was still more emphatic in the assertion 
of the right of interference. He boldly asserted 
that " flagrant acts of cruelty " were committed 
in carrying on the African slave-trade ; and, while 
nobody proposed to violate the Constitution, 
"that we have a right to regulate this business is 
as clear as that we have any right whatever ; nor 
has the contrary been shown by anybody who has 
spoken on the occasion." Nor did he stop there. 
He told the slave-holders that the value of their 
slaves in money was only about ten million dol- 
lars, and that Congress had the right to propose 
" to purchase the whole of them ; and their re- 
• sources in the western territory might furnish 
them with the means." The Southern members 



168 JAMES MADISON. 

would, perhaps, have been startled by such a 
proposition as this, had he not immediately added 
that " he did not intend to suggest a measure of 
this kind ; he only instanced these particulars to 
show that Congress certainly had a right to inter- 
meddle in the " business." It is quite likely, had 
he pushed such a measure with his well-known 
zeal and determination, that it would have been 
at least received with a good deal of favor ; and, 
as the admirers of Jefferson are tenacious of his 
fame as the author of the original Northwest Or- 
dinance, so Gerry, had he seriously and earnestly 
urged the policy of using the proceeds of the sales 
of territorial lands to remunerate the owners of 
slaves for their liberation, would have left behind 
him a more fragi'ant memory than that which 
clings to him as a minister to France, and as 
the " Gerrymandering " governor of Massachu- 
setts. The debate, however, came to an end at 
last with no other result than that which would 
have been reached at the beginning without de- 
bate, except, perhaps, that the vote in favor of 
the reports upon the memorials was smaller than 
it might have been had there been no discussion. 
Within less than two years, however, Warner 
Mifflin of Delaware, an eminent member of the 
Society of Friends, who was one of the first, if 
not the first, of that society to manumit his own 
slaves, petitioned Congress to take some measure 
for general emancipation. The petition was en* 



NATIONAL FINANCES. — SLAVERY. 169 

tered upon the journal ; but on a subsequent day 
a Noitli Carolina member, Mr. Steele, said that 
" after what had passed at New York on this sub- 
ject, he had hoped the House would have heard 
no more of it ; " and he moved that the petition 
be returned to Mifflin and be expunged from the 
journal. Fisher Ames explained in a rather apol- 
ogetic tone that he had presented the petition at 
Mr. Mifflin's request, because the member from 
Delaware was absent, and because he believed in 
the right of petition, though " he considered it as 
totally inexpedient to interfere with the subject." 
The House agreed that the petition should be re- 
turned, and Steele then withdrew the motion to 
expunge it from the journal. 

In the next Congress, eighteen months after- 
ward, the House took up the subject of the slave- 
trade, apparently of its own motion, and a bill 
was passed prohibiting the carrying on of that 
traffic from the ports of the United States in for- 
eign vessels. The question was as inexorable as 
death, and the difference in regard to it then was 
precisely what it was in the final discussion of the 
next century which settled it forever. One set of 
men was given over to perdition if they dared so 
much as talk ; the other set talked all the more, 
and went to the very verge of the Constitution in 
act all the more, because they were bidden nei- 
ther to speak nor to move. Courage was not 
one of Madison's marked characteristics, but he 



170 JAMES MADISON. 

never showed more of it than in his hostility to 
slavery. 

At the third session of the First Congress, 
which had adjourned from New York to Philadel- 
phia, where it met in December, 1790, Madison led 
his party in opposition to the establishment of a 
national bank, which Hamilton had recommended ; 
and again, as in the adjustment of the domestic 
debt, he and his party were defeated. He com- 
pared the advantages and the disadvantages of 
banks, and possibly he did not satisfy himself, as 
he certainly did not the other side, that the weight 
of the argument was against their utility. At any 
rate, he fell back upon the Constitution as his 
strongest position. To incorporate a bank was 
not, he maintained, among the powers conferred 
upon Congress. The Federalists, who were be- 
ginning to recognize him as the leader of the op- 
position, were quite ready to accept that challenge. 
" Little doubt remains," said Fisher Ames, in 
rising to reply, ^' with respect to the utility of 
banks." Assuming that to be settled, — whether 
he meant, or not, that such was tlie conclusion to 
be drawni from Madison's argument on that point, 
. — he addressed himself to the constitutional ques- 
tion. If the incorporation of a bank was forbid- 
den by the Constitution there was an end of the 
matter. If it was not forbidden, but if Congress 
may exercise powers not expressly bestowed upon 
it, and if by a bank some of the things which the 



NATIONAL FINANCES. -SLAVERY, 171 

Federal Government had to do could be best done, 
it would be not only right but wise to establish 
such an agency. This was the burden of the ar- 
gument of the Federalists, and Madison and his 
friends had no sufficient answer. The bill was at 
length passed by a vote of thirt^'-nine to twenty. 

But it had still to pass the ordeal of the cabi- 
net. The President was not disposed to rely upon 
his own judgment either one way or the other. 
He asked, therefore, for the written opinions of 
the Secretaries of the Treasury and of State, Ham- 
ilton and Jefferson, and the Attorney General, 
Randolph. The same request was made to Madi- 
son, probably more because Washington held his 
ability and knowledge of constitutional law in 
high esteem, than because of the prominent part 
he had taken in the debate. Hamilton's argu- 
ment in favor of the bill was an answer to the 
papers of the three other gentlemen, and was ac- 
cepted as conclusive by the President. 



CHAPTER XII. 

FEDERALISTS A^'D EEPUBLICANS. 

Madison was a Federalist until, unfortunately, 
he drifted into the opposition. He was swept 
away partly, perhaps, by the influence of personal 
friends, particularly of Jefferson, and partly by the 
influence of locality — that '' go-with-the-State " 
doctrine, which is a harmless kind of patriotism 
when kept within proper limits, but dangerous in 
a mixed government like ours when unrestrained. 
Had he been born in a free State it seems more 
than probable that he would never have been 
President ; but it is quite possible that his place 
in the history of his country would have been 
higher. The better part of his life was before he 
became a party leader. As his career is followed 
the presence of the statesman grows gradually 
dimmer in the shadow of the successful politician. 

In the course of the three sessions of the First 
Congress the line was distinctly drawn between 
the Federal and Republican (or Democratic) par- 
ties. The Federalists, it was evident, had suc- 
ceeded in firmly uniting thirteen separate States 
into one great nation, or into what, in due time. 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 173 

was sure to become a great nation. It was no 
longer a loose assemblage of thirteen independent 
bodies, revolving, indeed, around a central power, 
but with a centrifugal motion that might at any 
time send them flying off into space, or destroy 
them by collisions at various tangents. Those 
who opposed the Federalists, however, had no fear 
of a tendency to tangents ; the danger was, as 
they believed, of too much centripetal force, and 
that the circling planets might fall into the central 
sun and disappear altogether. Even if there were 
no flying off into space, and no falling into the 
sun, they had no faith in this sort of political as- 
tronomj^ They were unwilling to float in fixed 
orbits obedient to a supreme law other than their 
own. 

There is no need to doubt the honesty of either 
party then, whatever came to pass in later years. 
Nor, however, is there any more doubt now which 
was the wiser. Before the end of the century the 
administration of government was wrested from 
the hands of those who had created the Union ; 
and within fifteen years more the Federal party, 
under that name, had disappeared. It would not 
be quite just to say that they were opposed for no 
better reason than because they were in power. 
But it is quite true that the principles and the 
policy of the Federalists survived the party organ- 
ization ,• and they not only survived, but, so far 
as the opposite party was ever of service to the 



174 JA3IES MADISON. 

country, it was when that party adopted the Fed- 
eral measures. It was in accordance with the 
early principles of Federalism that the Kepublic 
was defended and saved in the war of 1860-65 ; 
as it was the principles of the Democratic state- 
rights party, administered by a slave-holding oli- 
garchy, that made that war inevitable. 

Hamilton said, in the well-known Carrington 
letter in the spring of 1792, that he was thor- 
oughly convinced by Madison's course in the late 
Congress that he, " cooperating with Mr. Jeffer- 
son, is at the head of a faction decidedly hostile to 
me and my administration, and actuated by views, 
in my judgment, subversive of the principles of 
good government, and dangerous to the union, 
peace, and happiness of the country." At first he 
was disposed to believe, because of his " previous 
impressions of the fairness of Mr. Madison's char- 
acter," that there was nothing personal or factious 
in this hostility. But he soon changed his mind. 
Up to the time of the meeting of the First Con- 
gress there had always been perfect accord be- 
tween them, and Hamilton accepted his seat in 
tlie cabinet '* under the full persuasion," he said, 
'*• that from similarity of thinking, conspiring witli 
personal good-will, I should have the firm support 
of Mr. Madison in the general course of my ad- 
minstration." But when he found in Madison his 
most determined opponent, either open or covert, 
in the most important measures he urged upon 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 175 

Congress, — the settlement of the domestic debt, 
the assumption of the debts of the States, and the 
establishment of a national bank, — he was com- 
pelled to seek for other than public motives for 
this opposition. " It had been," he declared, 
" more uniform and persevering than I have been 
able to resolve into a sincere difference of opinion. 
I cannot persuade myself that Mr. Madison and I, 
whose politics had formerly so much the same 
point of departure, should now diverge so widely 
in our opinions of the measures which are proper 
to be pursued." 

In the letter from which these extracts are 
made Jefferson and Madison are painted as almost 
equally black, though the color was laid the 
thicker on Jefferson, if there was any difference. 
Hamilton seemed to think that, if Jefferson was 
the more malicious, Madison was the more artful. 
He is accused of an attempt to get the better of 
the Secretary of the Treasury by a trick which 
was dishonorable in itself, and at the same time 
an abuse of the confidence reposed in him by 
Washington. Before sending in his message at 
the opening of the Second Congress the President 
submitted it to Madison, who, Hamilton declares, 
so altered it, by transposing a passage and by the 
addition of a few words, that the President was 
made to seem, unconsciously to himself, to ap- 
prove of Jefferson's proposal to establish the same 
unit for coins as for weights. This would have 



176 JAMES MADISON. 

been to disapprove of the proposal of the Secre- 
tary of tlie Treasury that the dollar should re- 
main the unit of coinage. The statement rests 
on Hamilton's assertion ; and as he had forgotten 
the words which made the change he complained 
of ; and as the message was restored to its original 
form by the President when its possible interpre- 
tation was pointed out to him, it is impossible now 
to judge whether Madison may not have been 
quite innocent of the intention imputed to him. 
It is plain enough, however, that Hamilton "was 
sore and disappointed at Madison's conduct, and 
that he was quick to seize upon any incident that 
justified him in saying, " The opinion I once en- 
tertained of the candor and simplicity and fair- 
ness of Mr. Madison's character has, I acknowl- 
edge, given way to a decided opinion that it is one 
of a peculiarly artificial and complicated kind." 
To justify this opinion, and as an evidence of how 
bitter Madison's political and personal enmity to- 
ward him had become, he refers in the same let- 
ter to Madison's relation to Freneau and his 
paper, " The National Gazette." *' As the coad- 
jutor of Jefferson," he wrote, "in the establish- 
ment of this paper, I include Mr. Madison in the 
consequences imputable to it." 

The story of Freneau need not be repeated 
here at length, having been already told in an- 
other volume of this series of biographies. If 
there were anything in that affair, however, for 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 177 

whicli Jefferson could be fairly called to account, 
Madison may be held as not less responsible. 
When the charge was made that he had a sinister 
motive in procuring for Freneau a clerkship in the 
State Department, and in aiding him to establish 
a newspaper, Madison frankly related the facts in 
a letter to Edmund Randolph. He had nothing 
to deny except to repel with some indignation the 
charge that he had helped to establish the jour^ 
nal in order that it might " sap the Constitution," 
or that there was the slightest expectation or in- 
tention on his part of any relation between the 
State Department and the newspaper. Freneau 
was one of his college friends, a deserving man, to 
whom he was attached, and whom he was glad to 
help. There was nothing improper in commend- 
ing one well qualified to discharge its duties for 
the post of translator in a government office, and 
as those duties, for which the yearly salary was 
only two hundred and fifty dollars, were light, 
there was no good reason why the clerk should not 
find other employment for leisure hours. 

If Mr. Madison, having said this, had stopped 
there, his critics would have been silenced. But 
when he added that he advised his friend with 
another motive besides that of helping him to 
start a newspaper, then, as the expressive modern 
phrase is, he " gave himself away." There is a 
feeling, common even in those early and innocent 
days when such things were rare, that the editor, 
12 



178 JAMES MADISON. 

whose daily bread, whether it be cake or crust, 
comes from the bounty of the man in office or 
other place of power — that an editor so fed, and 
perhaps fattened, is only a servant bought at a 
price. Madison said that to help a needy man 
whom he held in high esteem was his " primary 
and governing motive." But he adds: "That, as a 
consequential one, I entertained hopes that a free 
paper . . . would be an antidote to the doctrines 
and discourses circulated in favor of monarch}^ and 
aristocracy; would be an acceptable vehicle of pub- 
lic information in many places not sufficiently 
supplied with it — this also is a certain truth." 
What was this but an acknowledgment of the 
essential truth of the charge brought against Jef- 
ferson and himself ? Not that he might not de- 
voutly hope for an antidote to the poisonous 
doctrines of monarchy and aristocracy, though in 
very truth the existence of any such poison was 
only one of the maggots which, bred in the muck 
of party strife, had found a lodgment in his brain ; 
not that it was not a commendable public spirit to 
wish for a good newspaper to circulate where it 
was most needed ; not that it was not a most excel- 
lent thing in him to hold out a helping hand to the 
friend who had been less fortunate than himself ; 
but that in helping his friend to a clerkship in a 
department of the government, his motive was in 
part that the possession of a public office would 
enable the 'man to establish a party organ. That 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 179 

was precisely the point of the charge which he 
seems to have failed to apprehend — that public 
patronage was used at his suggestion to further 
party ends. 

Freneau had intended to start a newspaper 
somewliere in New Jersey. Whether or not that 
known intention suggested that the project could 
be better carried out in Philadelphia, and a clerk- 
ship in the State Department would be an aid to 
it, the change of plan was adopted and the clerk- 
ship bestowed upon him. The paper — the first 
number of which appeared five days after his ap- 
pointment — was, as it was known that it would 
be, an earnest defender of Jefferson and his friends, 
and a formidable opponent of Hamilton and his 
party. The logical conclusion was that the man, 
being put in place for a purpose, was diligent in 
using the opportunities the place afforded him to 
fulfill the hopes of those to whom he was indebted. 
Madison and Jefferson both denied, with much 
heat and indignation, that they had anything to 
do with the editorial conduct of the paper. No 
doubt they spoke the truth. They had to draw 
the line somewhere ; they drew it there ; and an 
exceedingly sharp and fine line it was. For it is 
plain that Freneau knew very well what he was 
about and what was expected of him, and his 
powerful friends knew very well that he knew it. 
They could feel in him the most implicit con- 
fidence as an untamed and untamable democrat, 



180 JAMES MADISON. 

and one, perhaps, whose gratitude would be kept 
aHve by the remembrance of poverty and the 
hope of future favors. There was clearly no need 
of a board of directors for the editorial super- 
vision of " The National Gazette," and it was 
quite safe to deny that any existed. The fact, 
nevertheless, remained, that a seat had been given 
the editor at Mr. Jefferson's elbow. 

Three months before Madison heard that his 
relation to Freneau was bringing him under pub- 
lic censure, he showed an evident interest in the 
" Gazette " hardly consistent with his subsequent 
avowal of having nothing to do with its manage- 
ment. In a letter to Jefferson he refers to the 
postage on newspapers, established by the bill for 
the regulation of post-offices, and fears that it will 
prove a grievance in the loss of subscribers. He 
suggests that a notice be given that the papers 
*' will not be put into the mail, but sent as hereto- 
fore^'' meaning by that, probably, that they would 
be sent under the franks of members of Congress, 
or by any other chance that might offer. " Will 
you," he adds, " hint this to Freneau ? His sub- 
scribers in this quarter seem pretty well satisfied 
with the degree of regularity and safety with 
which they get the papers, and highly pleased 
with the paper itself." This was careful dry- 
nursing for the bantling which had been pro- 
vided with so comfortable a cradle in the State 
Department. 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 181 

The political casuist of our time may wonder at 
tlie importance which attached to this Freneau 
affair. We are taught that " there were giants 
in those days ; " but we may also remember that 
in the modern science of " practical politics " they 
were as babes and sucklings. Madison was making 
good his place as a leader of the opposition hardly 
second to Jefferson himself. As with Hamilton, 
so with the Federalists generally, he fell more 
even than Jefferson fell in their esteem. He fell 
more, because he had farther to fall. No man 
had been more earnest than he for a consolidated 
government ; no one had shown more activity to 
bring about a convention to frame a Federal Con- 
stitution ; and when at last that work was done, 
no one, not even Hamilton himself, was more 
zealous to convince his countrymen that national 
salvation depended upon union, and that miion 
was hopeless unless the Constitution should be 
adopted. The disappointment and the shock were 
all the greater when he gradually drew off from 
those who had hitherto counted him as on their 
side. They could not understand how he could 
find so much to opj)ose in the legitimate adminis- 
tration — as they believed it to be — of a Consti- 
tution he had done so much to create, and the 
beneficent results of which he had foreseen and 
foretold. Or, if they understood him, it was on 
the supposition that he had thrown his convic- 
tions and his principles to the winds, abandoned 



182 JAMES MADISON. 

his old friends and attached himself to new ones, 
from motives of personal ambition. This, of 
course, may not have been absolutely just. It is 
quite possible that he did not deliberately sur- 
render his principles, but persuaded himself that 
he was as true as ever to the Constitution. It is, 
nevertheless, certainly true that the men with 
whom he was now acting were the men who, hav- 
ing failed to prevent the adoption of the Consti- 
tution, now aimed by zealous endeavors for an as- 
sumed strict construction to defeat the purpose 
for which it was framed.^ 

Naturally his motives were suspected, and his 
conduct narrowly watched. Jefferson's influence 
over him was known to be great, and Jefferson had 
had nothing to do with the framing of the Consti- 
tution, had been doubtful at first of its wdsdom, 
and gave his assent to it at last with many doubts. 
The Anti-Federal party was growing gradually 
stronger in Virginia as in all the Southern States ; 
most of Madison's warmest personal friends, as 
well as Jefferson, were of that part3\ What 
chance would he have in the public career lie had 

1 " I reverence the Constitution," said Fisher Ames, in debate, 
" and I readily admit that the frequent appeal to that as a stand- 
ard proceeds from a respectful attachment to it. So far it is a 
source of agreeable reflection. But I feel very different emotions, 
when I find it almost daily resorted to in questions of little im- 
portance. When by strained and fanciful constnictions it is made 
an instrument of casuistry, it is to be feared it may lose something 
in our minds in point of certainty, and more in point of dig 
nity." 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 183 

marked out for himself if Lis path and theirs led 
in 023posite directions ? How much he was influ- 
enced by these considerations it is impossible to 
tell ; perhaps he himself could not have told. 
Perhaps they were not even considerations, but 
only unconscious influences, which he would have 
thrown behind him had he recognized them as pos- 
sible motives. To others, however, whether justly 
or not, they were quite sufficient to explain his 
course, and, once accepted, no other explanation 
was sought for. The appointment of Freneau to 
office at Madison's request, followed by the almost 
immediate appearance of a violent party organ, 
edited by this clerk in Mr. Jefferson's department, 
was quite enough to raise an outcry among the 
Federalists ; and Madison's explanation, when it 
came to be known, of his share in that business, 
did not add to his reputation either for frankness 
or political rectitude. Perhaps it was at first more 
the seeming want of frankness that disgusted his 
old friends. They could have more readily for- 
given him had he oj)enly declared that he had 
gone over to the enemy, instead of professing to 
find in the Constitution sufficient ground for hos- 
tility to their measures. These constitutional 
scruples they sometimes thought so thin a disguise 
of other motives as to be better deserving of ridi- 
cule than of argument. 

All he said and did was watched with suspicion. 
In the interval between the First and Second 



k 



184 JAMES 31 AD I SON. 

Congresses, he and Jefferson made a tour tbrough 
some of the Eastern States, as they said, for relax- 
ation and pleasure. But it was looked upon as a 
strategic movement. Interviews between them 
and Livingston and Burr in New York were re- 
ported to Hamilton as "a passionate courtship." 
They visited Albany, it was said, " under the pre- 
text of a botanical excursion," but in reality to 
meet with Clinton. Botany naturally suggests 
agriculture, and as they continued on their jour- 
ney into New England they were accused of " sow- 
ing tares," as they traveled. Such treachery 
would have been considered as aggravated by 
hypocrisy had it been known then that on his re- 
turn Mr. Madison wrote to his father from New 
York : " The tour I lately made with Mr. Jeffer- 
son, of which I have given the outlines to my 
brother, was a very agreeable one, and carried 
us through interesting country, new to us both." 
This was cool, if the journey really was a political 
reconnoissance. 

Though Mr. Madison may have been for a time 
a special target for this kind of partisan rancor, 
it was by no means confined to him. Jefferson 
had a very pretty talent for exasperating his 
enemies, and nobody could long divide with him 
the distinction of being the best hated man in 
the country. A curious instance of it was given 
when the question was discussed, both in the 
First and Second Congresses, as to the successor 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 185 

to tlie presidency in case the office should become 
vacant by the deatlis of both President and Vice- 
President. A bill was sent down from the Sen- 
ate to the House, providing, in case such a thing 
should ever happen, that the President pro tem- 
pore of the Senate, or, should the Senate have no 
temporary President, the Speaker of the House 
of Representatives should succeed to the vacant 
office. The House sent back the bill with an 
amendment substituting the Secretary of State 
for the succession in the possible vacancy instead 
of the presiding officers of the two Houses of Con- 
gress. Madison was very earnest for this amend- 
ment, but the Senate rejected it and the House 
finally assented to the original bill, which is the 
law to-day. It was shown in the course of the 
debate, that according to the doctrine of chances 
the office of president would not devolve, through 
the accident of death, upon a third person oftener 
than once in about eight hundred and forty years. 
The rejection of the amendment naming the Sec- 
retary of State as the proper person to succeed to 
the presidency, in the improbable event supposed, 
was nevertheless resented by the Republicans as a 
direct reflection upon Mr. Jefferson. Nor did the 
Federalists deny it. With grim humor they seized 
upon the opportunity, apparently, to announce, 
that not with their consent should he ever be 
president even by accident, though he should 
wait literally eight hundred and forty years. It 



186 JAMES MADISON. 

was a long range shot, but there could not have 
been one better aimed. 

If before there had been some room for hope, 
Madison's course in the Second Congress left no 
doubt as to which party he had cast his lot with. 
His hostility to the establishment of a bank was, 
lie thought, justified by what he saw at the open- 
ing of the subscription books in New York. The 
anxiety to get possession of the stock was not to 
him an evidence of public confidence, and an argu- 
ment, therefore, in favor of such an institution ; 
but " a mere scramble for so much public plun- 
der." He could only see that "stock-jobbing 
drowns every other subject. The coffee-house is 
in an eternal buzz with the gamblers." "It pretty 
clearly appears also," he said, " in what propor- 
tions the public debt lies in the country ; what 
sort of hands holding it ; and by whom the people 
of the United States are to be governed." Here, 
perhaps, was one cause of his hostility to Hamil- 
ton's financial policy. Its immediate benefit was 
for that class whose pecuniary stake in the stabil- 
ity of the government was the largest. This class 
was chiefly in the Northern States where capital 
was in money and was always on the lookout for 
safe and profitable investment. At the South, 
capital was in slaves and land, and could not be 
easily changed. If the Bank and the bond-hold- 
ers were to exercise — as he feared they would, 
and as he believed that the Federalists meant they 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 187 

should — a controlling influence over the govern- 
ment, it was certainly pretty apparent " by whom 
the people of the United States were to be gov- 
erned." It would be the North, not the South; 
and he was a Virginian before he was a Unionist. 
Perhaps he was influenced by this consideration 
when he proposed that the payment of the domes- 
tic debt should be divided between those who had 
originally held, and those who had acquired by 
purchase, the certificates of indebtedness. The 
public creditors would, in that case have been 
more widely distributed in different sections of 
the country and among different classes. The 
thought, at any rate, does not seem to have been 
a new one when he saw and reported the eager- 
ness with which the bank stock Avas sought for, 
denounced it as stock-jobbing and gambling, and 
indignantly reflected that in these men he saw the 
future governors of the country, and particularly 
of his own people. No doubt there was a good 
deal of speculation ; and, as at all such times, 
there were a few who made fortunes, while many 
who had, at first, much money and no stock, next 
much stock and no money, had at last neither 
stock nor money. But Mr. Madison's indignation 
was quite wasted, and his fears quite unfounded. 
Neither the stock-jobbers, the Bank, nor the bond- 
holders ever usurped the government, whatever 
may have been Hamilton's hopes or schemes, if he 
had any other than to serve his country. The 



188 JAMES MADISON. 

monej'-power of the North built cities and ships, 
factories and towns, and stretched out its hands 
to the great lakes and over the broad prairies, to 
add to its dominion, to extend its civilization, and 
to give to labor and industry their due reward. It 
was the South that devoted itself to the business 
of politics, and, united by stronger bonds than can 
ever be forged of gold alone, soon entered into 
possession of the government, which it retained 
and used for its own interests, without regard to 
the interests or the rights of the North, for nearly 
three quarters of a century. Mr. Madison had no 
prescience of any such future in the history of the 
country, nor, indeed, then had anybody else. He 
may have really believed that the holders of a 
large public debt and the owners of a great na- 
tional bank, through which the monetary affairs 
of the country could be controlled, were aiming 
to lay hold of the government. If all this were 
true, imminent peril was impending over repub- 
lican institutions. The inconsistency of which 
Hamilton accused Madison w^as therefore not nec- 
essarily a crime. It might even be a virtue, and 
Madison be applauded for his courage in avowing 
a change of opinion, if he saw in the practical 
application of Hamilton's principles dangers that 
had not occurred to him when looking at them 
only as abstract theories. But the Federalists be- 
lieved that Madison, governed b}^ these purely 
selfish motives, sacrificed his convictions of what 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS, 189 

was best for the country that be migbt secure for 
liimself a position on what be foresaw was tbe 
winning side. It is quite likely tbat tbe more 
pronounced enmity be sbowed towards Hamilton 
during tbe second session of Congress was due, in 
some measure, to bis knowledge of tbis feeling to- 
wards bimself among tbe Federalists. He seemed, 
at any rate, to be animated by something more 
tban tbe proverbial zeal of tbe new convert. If 
it was not always shown in debate, it lurked in 
bis letters. Anything tbat came from tbe Sec- 
retary, or anything tbat favored tbe Secretary's 
measures, was sure to be opposed by him. Pie 
was not, of course, always in the wrong, and some- 
times be was very right. There was a manifest 
disposition on tbe part of tbe Federalists in the 
House to defer to the Secretary in a way to pro- 
voke opposition from those who did not share in 
their estimate of bis great ability. There was 
some resentment, for example, when it was pro- 
posed tbat Congress should submit to tbe Secre- 
tary the question of ways and means to carry on 
the Indian war at tbe West, after St. Clair's dis- 
astrous defeat ; and when, a few daj^s later, it was 
suggested tbat be should be called upon to report 
a plan for tbe reduction of tbe public debt. Mem- 
bers, chief among them Madison, thought tbat 
they were quite capable of discharging the duties 
belonging to their branch of the government with- 
out instructions from a bead of department whom 



190 JAMES MADISON. 

many of them looked upon as only an official sub- 
ordinate of Congress. For the same reason they 
refused with prompt decision to permit the Secre- 
tary to appear upon the floor or the House to ex- 
plain some proposed measure. In the Carrington 
letter Hamilton said that he had " openly de- 
clared" a "determination to treat him [Madison] 
as a political enem3\" He probabl}^ took care 
that Madison should hear of it, for he was not a 
man who made idle threats. He was sometimes 
arrogant and overbearing in manner, was always 
ready for a fight, which he rather preferred to 
quietude, and had little disposition to spare an en- 
emy. These were not conciliating qualities likely 
to temper tlie asperities of political warfare, and 
they may have provoked even Madison, mild-man- 
nered and almost timid as he was, to unusual heat. 
All this, of course, is aside from the question 
whether the party, to which Mr. Madison had 
given his allegiance, was right or wrong. On that 
point there may be an honest difference of opin- 
ion. It is apart also from the question whether 
a man may not honestly change sides in politics, 
notwithstanding the suspicion that always follows 
him who runs from one side to the other, when in 
neither has there been any change in principles 
or measures. It is quite possible that he may be 
governed by the most sincere convictions ; and if 
he obeys them and abandons old friends for new 
ones, or consents to be friendless, it is the strong- 



FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLICANS. 191 

est proof the statesman or politician can give of a 
moral courage which ought to gam for him all 
the more respect. But whether that respect must 
be denied to Mr. Madison, because he was gov- 
erned by other and lower motives, is the question. 
There had been no change of political principles 
either in the party he had left or the party he 
had joined; but each was striving with all its 
might to adapt the old doctrines to the altered 
condition of affairs under the new Union. The 
change was wholly in Mr. Madison. That which 
had been white to him was now black ; that 
which had been black was now as the driven 
snow. Why was this ? Had he come to see that 
in all those years he had been wrong ? Or had 
he suddenly learned, not that he was wrong, but 
that he had mistaken a straight and narrow path 
for the broad road which would lead to the goal 
he was seeking? These are not pleasant ques- 
tions. He had served his country well ; one does 
not like to doubt whether it was with a selfish 
rather than a noble purpose. But of any public 
man who changed front as he changed, the ques- 
tion always will be — what moved him ? Not to 
ask it in regard to Madison is to drop out of sight 
the turning-point of his career ; not to consider it 
is to leave unheeded essential light upon one side 
of his character. For his own fortunes the choice 
he made was judicious, if to "gain the whole 
world " is always the wisest and best thing to do. 



192 JAMES MADISON. 

He gained his world, and was wise and virtuous 
in liis generation according to the vote of a large 
majority. Whether that decision still holds good 
it is not so easy to say ; probably it does, however; 
for the popular estimate of men often remains un- 
changed long after the judgment upon the events 
which gave them celebrity is completely reversed. 
But history, in the long run, weighs with even 
scales ; and the verdict on Madison's character 
usually comes with that pitiful recommendation to 
mercy from a jury loath to condemn. Admiration 
for his great services in the Constitutional Con- 
vention and after it, when its work was presented 
to the people for their approval, has never been 
withheld ; upon his official integrity and his high 
sense of honor in all his personal relations, except 
when obligation to party may have overshadowed 
it, there rests no cloud ; and his intellectual power 
is never questioned. One having these recognized 
qualities, and who for five and twenty years was 
generally high in office, must needs be held in 
high estimation especially in a new country where 
fame, like everything else, is cheap. Nevertheless, 
impartial historians, who venture to believe that 
nature admits of imperfections in a native of Vir- 
ginia, declare their conviction that Mr. Madison 
either wanted the strength and courage to resist 
the influence of those about him, or that the am- 
bition of the politician was strong enough to over- 
come any consideration of principles that might 
stand in his way. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

FRENCH POLITICS. 

If any proof were wanting of how completely 
Madison had gone over to the opposition, he gave 
it in the memorable attack upon the Secretary of 
the Treasury in the spring of 1793, within four 
days of the close of the second session of the Sec- 
ond Congress. It was hoped by that proceeding 
to overwhelm Hamilton with disgrace, and that 
the President would feel himself obliged to expel 
him from the cabinet. When the resolutions 
with this aim were offered, a member said that 
delicacy, decency, and every rule of justice had 
been violated ; " a more unhandsome proceeding 
he had never seen in Congress;" he might have 
remained a member to this day, and, save for the 
attempts in our time to expel John Quincy Ad- 
ams and Joshua R. Giddings, not have changed 
his opinion. 

In the course of the preceding year Hamilton, 
under various signatures, had met his opponents 
in the newspapers. But it was a veil, not a visor, 
behind which he fought; for everybody knew 
from whom came the vigorous blows that he dealt 

13 



194 JAMES MADISON. 

about him right and left. It was a boast always 
of Jefferson that he never condescended to news- 
paper controversy; but it was pretty well under- 
stood that he himself did not enter upon that 
rather unsatisfactory mode of warfare, because he 
preferred the safer method of fighting by proxy. 
Hamilton never was in doubt as to who was his 
real antagonist, and he aimed his blows over the 
heads of his petty assailants to where he knew 
they would hit home. They left bad bruises 
upon his colleague in the cabinet. Among other 
papers of the time, though not a newspaper arti- 
cle, was an official letter to the President, in 
which Hamilton defended his principles and his 
measures. Early in 1792, the President, longing 
to escape the toils of public life and to spend 
the rest of his days in tranquillity, had consulted 
Madison and his two Secretaries, Jefferson and 
Hamilton, upon the propriety of his declining a 
reelection. He soon changed his mind, influenced, 
perhaps, as much by the dissensions, so evident in 
the expostulations of his friends, as by the expos- 
tulations themselves. He deprecated this open 
feud between his Secretaries as a public misfor- 
tune, and sought, if he could not reconcile them, 
to silence it. That the Federalists were monarch- 
ists, as Jefferson and Madison never ceased assert- 
ing, he knew was not true, without the emphatic 
and indignant declarations of Hamilton, Adams, 
and other leading men of that party, when they con. 



FRENCH POLITICS, 195 

descended to notice a charge which they deemed 
so absurd that it was difficult to believe that any- 
body could make it in earnest. But, while he 
knew there was no real danger from that quarter, 
he could not fail to see that the reverence and love 
in which he was held constituted a bond of unity, 
so long as he remained chief magistrate ; and he 
may have felt that, should he retire, there was no 
other common tie strong enough at that moment 
to hold together a Union, the possible dissolution 
of which was, both at the North and at the South, 
considered with calmness, sometimes with compla- 
cency, and, when party passion was at a red heat, 
even as a thing to be prayed for. At any rate 
the President consented to take the advice of the 
counselors whom he had consulted ; but in ask- 
ing that advice he unwittingly aggravated the 
quarrel among them which caused him so much 
uneasiness. 

Jefferson, in the arguments he set forth both in 
conversation and by letter to influence Washing- 
ton's decision, dwelt upon the unhappy condition 
of public affairs. It was a storm which he himself 
meant to get out of by retiring to Monticello, 
though he thought it was Washington's duty to 
remain at the helm and keep an eye to windward. 
This unhappy condition of affairs, he said, had all 
come from the course pursued by the Secretary of 
the Treasury, and was the natural consequence of 
the acts of Congress in relation to the public debt, 



196 JAMES MADISON. 

the Bank, excise, currency, and other important 
measures passed in accordance with the Secre- 
tary's policy. Whether this policy was meant to 
destroy the Union, subvert the Republic, and es- 
tablish a monarchy upon its ruins ; at any rate 
such must be the inevitable result of those mis- 
chievous measures. He urged this view of the 
subject with such pertinacity, that Washington, 
either because he was impressed by so much ear- 
nestness, or because he was curious to know how 
the assertions could best be answered, sent them 
to Hamilton, with other objections of a similar 
character from other persons, and asked for a re- 
ply. No names were given ; but it is not likely 
that Hamilton was at any loss in guessing wliere 
such strictures upon his administration of affairs 
c:ime from. " I have not fortitude enough," he 
said in his answer, " always to hear with calmness 
calumnies which necessarily include me as a prin- 
cipal object in the measures censured, of the false- 
hood of which I have the most unqualified con- 
sciousness. ... I acknowledge that I cannot be 
entirely patient under charges which impeach the 
integrity of my public motives or conduct. I feel 
that I merit them in no degree, and expressions of 
indignation sometimes escape me in spite of every 
effort to suppress them." There were only two 
men in the country whom he could have had in 
mind when he wrote such words as these. In all 
Washington's career there is nowhere a stronger 



FRENCH POLITICS. 197 

proof of his strong will, self-reliance, and passion- 
less impartiality, than that he could stand be- 
tween two such furnaces as Hamilton on one side, 
and Jefferson and Madison on the other, both 
glowing at the intensest white heat, while he re- 
mained usually as calm and as unmoved as if 
breathing the softest, balmiest, and gentlest airs 
of a day in June. But all this personal contro- 
versy in the public prints, and in the official in- 
tercourse of the cabinet, left on both sides an in- 
tense exasperation, which could not fail to have 
a controlling influence in the conduct of political 
parties. Whether Jefferson was conscious or not 
— and whatever his feeling was, Madison shared 
it with him — that in this paper warfare he was 
signally defeated, the attempt to ruin Hamilton 
by an attack upon him in Congress followed, if it 
was not the consequence of, the mortification of 

defeat. 

In February, 1793, Mr. Giles, a representative 
from Virginia, offered a series of resolutions call- 
ing upon the President for certain information re- 
ladng to the finances. They were a bold attack 
upon'^the Secretary of the Treasury, and, should 
it prove that they could not be satisfactorily an- 
swered, would convict him of mismanagement of 
the financial affairs of the government, of a disre- 
gard of law, of usurpation of power, and even of 
embezzlement of the public funds. Any reasona- 
ble ground for believing such charges to be well- 



198 JAMES MADISON. 

founded would be quite sufficient to bring the 
Secretary to trial by impeacbment. There was 
probably little doubt at the moment as to whence 
this blow came ; for, though the hand might seem 
the hand of Esau, the voice was the voice of Jacob. 
Behind Giles was Madison ; and behind Madison, 
of course, was Jefferson. Mr. John C. Hamilton, 
in his " History of the Republic," asserts that the 
resolutions were still — when he wrote, twenty- 
five years ago — in the archives of the State De- 
partment at Washington, in Madison's handwrit- 
ing ; and he further declares that Giles assured 
Rufus King that Madison was their author. 

Hamilton's reply, so far as any intentional 
wrong-doing was imputed to him, was conclusive. 
There had been technical violations of acts of 
Congress in one instance, but it was only to carry 
out the acts themselves. Congress had, three 
years before, passed two acts authorizing the ne- 
gotiation of two loans, one for twelve million dol- 
lars for the discharge of the foreign debt, and 
another for two million dollars to be used at home. 
It had been convenient, and had conduced to the 
success of the negotiation, to offer in Holland to 
contract a loan for fourteen million dollars, with- 
out the unnecessary, and to foreigners probably 
the confusing, statement that the authority for 
borrowing that amount was derived from two sep- 
arate acts of Congress. It was only in this bor- 
rowing of the money that there was any seeming 



FRENCH POLITICS. 199 

disregard of the letter of the law. The loans and 
their purposes were kept entirely distinct in the 
accounts of the department. Other questions 
touching the management of these loans were so 
clearly and frankly explained that nothing but 
the captiousness of party could refuse to be satis- 
fied. On one point — the charge of an alleged 
deficit — the opposition was absolutely silenced. 
The Secretary indignantly explained, that the sum 
— as anybody could have known for the asking 
from any ofiicer in the Treasury Department — 
which was made to appear as missing was in 
credits for customs bonds not yet due, and bills 
of exchange on Europe, sold but not yet paid for. 
Though there was enough of decency, or of 
prudence which took the place of decency, to drop 
the insinuation that the Secretary had stolen what 
had never been in his possession, it was not so 
with the rest of the accusations. Only four days 
before Congress was to adjourn, Giles offered an- 
other set of resolutions. These assumed that the 
defiance of law and unwarranted assumption of 
power, which, at first, were only suggested by the 
inquiries, were now proved to be true by the ex- 
planations that had been given. The indictment, 
therefore, was made to include the verdict and the 
sentence ; the criminal was accused, was to be 
found guilty, and condemned to capital punish- 
ment in one proceeding, without tlie privilege of 
trial, or a recognition of the right to be heard. 



200 JAMES MADISON. 

The argument of the resolutions was, that certain 
acts were a violation of law ; that the Secretary 
had committed all those acts ; and therefore it 
was tlie will of the House that the facts be re- 
ported to the President. The presumption ob- 
viously was that the President would immediately 
dismiss from office a disgraced and faithless public 
servant. But the prosecution was an utter fail- 
ure. The largest vote received for any of the res- 
olutions was only fifteen ; that on the others was 
from seven to twelve, in a quorum of from fifty to 
sixty members. In the course of the debate Mr. 
Madison had said that " his colleague [Giles] had 
rendered a service highly valuable to the legisla- 
ture, and no less important and acceptable to the 
public." The House showed by its votes how 
very far it was from agreeing with him. But 
Fisher Ames wrote, about that time, — " Madison 
is become a desperate party leader, and I am not 
sure of his stopping at any ordinary point of ex- 
tremity." If it be really true that he instigated 
this attack upon Hamilton, and was the author 
of the resolutions, using Giles as his tool to get 
them before the House, Ames's reflection was not 
uncharitable. 

It would not be just, however, to leave the im- 
pression that the hostility shown in this affair was 
purely personal. Both Jefferson and Madison had 
a hearty hatred for Hamilton which would have 
been greatly gratified could they have made it the 



FRENCH POLITICS. 201 

plain duty of the President to put him out of the 
Treasury Department, a dishonored and ruined 
man. But this particular outbreak of their en- 
mity was intensified by their sincere and earnest 
enthusiasm for France. They were quite willing 
to bring Hamilton to grief at any time, because 
he was Hamilton ; they were more than ordina- 
rily exasperated against him just now because in 
recent newspaper and other controversies he had 
altogether got the better of them ; but in this par- 
ticular instance they wanted to punish him be- 
cause of delay of payments in discharge of the in- 
debtedness of the United States to France. This 
was the essential delinquency at which the Giles 
resolutions were pointed. The difficulty was, not 
that the Secretary of the Treasury was not care- 
ful enough of the public money, but that he was 
too careful. He insisted upon being quite certain, 
when paying off a public debt, that he was paying 
it to the right persons, and that no risk should be 
incurred of its being demanded a second time. 
He felt there was no such certainty about pa)'- 
ments to France. The King was- dethroned ; bub 
it was not wise, the Secretary thought, to be hasty 
in recognizing revolutionary governments. It was 
republic to-day ; it might be a regency to-mor- 
[row ; a monarchy again the third day. It was 
more prudent to await a reasonable period for the 
evidence of permanency on one side or the other. 
Those old enough to remember the late war of the 



202 JAMES MADISON. 

rebellion know how important the maintenance of 
this doctrine was in regard to the recognition of 
the rebel confederacy by England and France. 

But to all this Jefferson did not in the least 
agree ; neither did Madison. They were in full, 
even passionate, sympathy with the men who 
brought Louis XVI. to the guillotine. Money, 
they knew, was needed, and it was a crime 
against liberty to delay payment, when payment 
was due to the French government. With Ham- 
ilton the question was, not whether the revolu- 
tionists ought to be, but- whether they were, 
France. With Jefferson and Madison they were 
France, because they ought to be. Hesitation to 
acknowledge that the revolution was the nation, 
they thought, could only come from an "Anglican 
party," the " enemies of France and of Liberty," 
who would lead the American people " into the 
arms, and ultimately into the government of 
Great Britain " — to use the terms in which Mad- 
ison spoke, a little later, of the Federalists. 
Which of these men, in this regard at least, were 
the thoughtful and prudent statesmen, and which 
were doctrinaires^ nobody now, probabl}^ ques- 
tions. The larger proportion of the people, how- 
ever, were then carried away by the enthusiasm 
for the French revolutionists. It was so, no 
doubt, at first without much distinction of party ; 
but it was inevitable, when the government should 
be called upon to take some decisive stand in rela- 



FRENCH POLITICS. 203 

tion to European politics, that the country should 
divide into two hostile camps ; or, rather, that the 
two camps already existing should become more 
hostile to each other than ever. It is not neces- 
sary to assume that the mass of the people gave 
themselves up to any very hard thinking about 
the matter. For the most part they followed, as 
the way is with parties, the political leaders to 
whom they were already accustomed, never doubt- 
ing that not to do so would be treacherous to the 
gratitude America owed to France, and to the 
cause of liberty and democrac}^ which, in the 
hands of the Frenchmen, was hurling monarchs 
from their thrones — at least one monarch from 
his, and more, it was hoped, would follow. But 
when the revolution ran into the terrible excesses 
of a later stage, if any Federalists had wavered in 
their allegiance to their chiefs they soon returned, 
persuaded that the wild and bloody anarchy of 
Paris was not the road that led to the establish- 
ment of a wise and safe popular government. 

There was no need now of pretexts for quarrel- 
ing; real causes came fast enough. France de- 
clared war against England, and the United 
States had its part to play in this strife of giants. 
Its real interest was to keep out of trouble ; and, 
if all were agreed on that point, it does not seem 
that there should have been much difficulty in 
saying so. " It behooves the government of this 
country," wrote Washington to Hamilton, "to 



204 JAMES Madison: 

use every means in its power to prevent the cit- 
izens thereof from embroiling us with either of 
those powers, by endeavoring to maintain a strict 
neutrality." It is difficult to conceive of a man 
being sincerely desirous of helping neither one 
side nor the other ; of injuring neither one side 
nor the other ; of maintaining, so far as help or 
harm could go, an attitude of absolute impar- 
tiality towards both — it is difficult to conceive of 
such a man quarreling with the word " neutral- 
ity " as applied to his position. But Jefferson, 
nevertheless, quarreled with it ; not frankly and 
directly as a thing he did not want, but captiously 
and hypercritically objecting to the word to cover 
his dislike to the thing itself. " A declaration of 
neutrality," he said, " was a declaration that there 
should be no war, to which the Executive was not 
competent." 

It was true that the Executive was not compe- 
tent to declare that there should be no war ; it 
was not true that the use of the word " neutral- 
ity " could have any such application to the future 
as to prevent Congress, when it should assemble, 
from declaring war should it see fit to do so. But 
meanwhile. Congress not being in session, and no 
exigency having arisen that made it desirable in 
the President's judgment to call an extra session, 
he, with the assent of the cabinet, — for Jefferson 
did not venture upon direct opposition, — issued a 
proclamation " to exhort and warn the citizens of 



FRENCH POLITICS. 205 

the United States carefully to avoid all acts and 
proceedings whatsoever " that might interfere with 
" the duty and interest of the United States " to 
" adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and im- 
partial towards the belligerent powers." The ob- 
jectionable word was left out in deference to Mr. 
Jefferson, who, really preferring that there should 
be no proclamation at all, hoped to take the sting 
out of it by the omission of a phrase. It was the 
thing said, not the way of saying it, that the Pres- 
ident insisted upon, as it was his duty to preserve 
the peace till the legislature should declare for 
war, and his inclination to preserve it altogether. 

It can hardly be doubted that Jefferson and his 
friends saw as plainly as the other party saw how 
perilous to the interests of the United States a 
foreign war would probably be. But while pro- 
fessing a desire to avoid it, they were far more 
anxious, apparently, to give aid, moral as well as 
material, to France, with whose revolutionary 
struggles they sympathized so deeply, than they 
were to avoid offense to England, whom they 
hated and would gladly see crippled. Not to be an 
enemy of England they held was to be an enemy 
of France ; and not of France merely, but of the 
*' rights of man." They could not or would not 
comprehend any wisdom in moderation, any pru- 
dence in delay. It is curious to see how party ani- 
mosity blinded even the best of them. The objec- 
tion to the word "neutrality" was a mere quib- 



206 JAMES MADISON. 

ble ; for the proclamation called upon all good cit- 
izens to maintain at their peril that state which, in 
all dictionaries, neutrality is defined to be. Mr. 
Jefferson, in instructing as Secretary of State the 
American ministers abroad as to the attitude as- 
sumed by the government, could find no better 
term than " a fair neutrality." The fact was, the 
Republican leaders wished to avoid taking any 
positive stand, partly because delay might be a 
help to France, and partly in obedience to the law 
of party politics, in opposition to the other side. 
They were not at first quite sure of their ground, 
and wanted to gain time. Mr. Madison seems to 
have waited about six weeks before he could ven- 
ture upon a positive opinion as to the proclama- 
tion. The newspapers helped him to a knowledge 
of party opinion, and party opinion helped him to 
make up his own. " Every ' Gazette ' I see," — 
he wrote in June, about eight weeks after the 
proclamation was published, — " every ' Gazette ' 
I see (except that of the United States [Federal- 
ist]), exhibits a spirit of criticism on the Anglified 
complexion charged on the Executive politics. . . . 
The proclamation was, in truth, a most unfortu- 
nate error." A week before he had been seem- 
ingly cautious even in writing to Jefferson. Then 
he had observed that newspaper criticisms aroused 
attention, and he had heard expressions of surprise 
" that the President should have declared the 
United States to be neutral in the unqualified 



FRENCH POLITICS. 207 

terms used, when we were so notoriously and un- 
equivocally under eventual engagements to de- 
fend the American possessions of France. I have 
heard it remarked, also, that the impartiality en- 
joined on the people was as little reconcilable with 
their moral obligations as the unconditional neu- 
trality proclaimed by the government is with the 
express articles of the treaty." He adds, " I have 
been mortified that on these points I could offer 
no bond fide explanations that might be satisfac- 
tory." He was not in doubt long, however. Mr. 
Jefferson sent him within two or three weeks a 
series of papers by Hamilton, under the signature 
of " Pacificus," in defense of the proclamation, 
and urged him to reply. This Madison undertook 
to do at once, and in five papers, under the signa- 
ture of " Helvidius," he took up all the points in 
dispute. 

The question relating to treaty obligations was 
the more serious. By the treaty of 1778 the 
United States had guarantied " to his Most Chris- 
tian Majesty, the present possessions of the Crown 
of France in America." An attempt on the part 
of Great Britain to take any of the French West 
India Islands would involve the United* States in 
tlie war. How, then, Mr. Madison's friends might 
well ask, as, in the letter just quoted he said they 
did, could " the President declare the United 
States to be neutral in the unqualified terms used, 
when we were so notoriously and unequivocally 



208 JAMES MAD/SON. 

under eventual engagements to defend the Amer- 
ican possessions of France " ? Hamilton's ground 
was that the treaty, by its terms, was " a defen- 
sive alliance," and therefore not binding in this 
case, inasmuch as the present war against England 
was offensive ; and that, besides, the treaty was 
in suspension, as France herself was, in a sense, in 
suspension, having only a provisional government, 
the permanent and legitimate successor to which 
was uncertain. But an important point was 
gained, it was thought, in the decision to receive 
Genet as the French minister. Hamilton, still 
acting in accordance with that cautious policy 
which he thought to be, in such a crisis, the most 
judicious, questioned whether a minister from the 
provisional government in Paris should be recog- 
nized without reservations. Such an ambassador 
might be followed presently by another accredited 
by a new power in the revolutionary progress. 
This would, at the least, be an awkward dilemma 
not to be recovered from without the loss of some 
dignity by the government of the United States. 
But this point also was yielded in deference to 
Jefferson, and much to his mortification the con- 
cession tuwied out to be before he was many weeks 
older. 

" I anxiously wish," Madison wrote to Jeffer- 
son, " that the reception of Genet may testify 
what I believe to be the real affections of the peo- 
ple." He was amply gratified. From Charles* 



FRENCH POLITICS. 209 

ton, where lie landed, to Pliiladelpliia, Genet was 
received with the warmest enthusiasm by all who 
sj'mpathized with France, and by that larger 
number among Americans who are always ready 
to hurrah for anything or anybody tliat has 
caught the popular fancy. Madison watched his 
progress with great interest, and apparently with 
some misgivings. Writing again a few days later, 
to Jefferson, he says that " the fiscal party in 
Alexandria was an overmatch for those who 
wished to testify the American sentiment." In- 
deed, he thinks it certain, he says in the same let- 
ter, " that Genet will be misled if he takes either 
the fashionable cant of the cities or the cold cau- 
tion of the government for the sense of the pub- 
lic " — falling himself, before he reaches the end 
of the sentence, into the cant of assuming neutral- 
ity in the government to be only a " mask " be- 
hind which to hide its "secret Anglomany." But 
he was quite mistaken in supposing that Genet 
was likely to be misled, or led at all, by anybody. 
He was almost capable, as General Knox said, of 
declaring the United States a department of 
France and of levying troops here to reduce the 
Americans to obedience. The man's conduct, if 
it had not been so outrageous, would have been 
ludicrous in its assumption of power, its disregard 
of the laws of the country, and its defiance of the 
government. Within three months of his arrival 
Jefferson himself was constrained to acknowledge 
u 



210 JAMES MADISON. 

that he had developed " a character and conduct 
so unexpected and so extraordinary, as to place us 
in the most distressing dilemma, between our re- 
gard for his nation, which is constant and sincere, 
and a regard for our laws, the authority of which 
must be maintained ; for the peace of our country, 
which the executive magistrate is charged to pre- 
serve ; for its honor, offended in the person of 
that magistrate ; and for its character, grossly 
traduced in the conversations and letters of this 
gentleman." Though this was in an official letter 
it gave, no doubt, Jefferson's real opinion ; for no 
man had more reason than he for resenting the 
conduct of the irrepressible Frenchman. Jeffer- 
son has been accused of too much familiarity with 
the French minister in private, and of tardiness 
in the discharge of his own duty as Secretary 
where it was likely to clash with the other's 
schemes. Genet himself complained that he -svas 
thrown over by Jefferson after receiving from him 
every encouragement. This is, of course, true, 
but not in the least discreditable to Jefferson. 
When Genet arrived in Philadelphia, he was, al- 
though he had already committed some illegal 
acts in Charleston, profuse in his promises of good 
behavior. The Secretary of State had welcomed 
him as the representative of France and the Rev- 
olution, and naturally he meant to make the most 
he could out of him, for the sake of the Republi- 
can party, as well as for the sake of the sacred 



FRENCH POLITICS. 211 

cause of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." But 
he soon saw that he was dealing with one who 
was a cross between a mountebank and a mad- 
man, as we learn from a letter of Madison to Jef- 
ferson, written within two months of Jefferson's 
first interview with Genet. " Your account of 
Genet," says the letter, " is dreadful. He must 
be brought right if possible. His folly will other- 
wise do mischief which no wisdom can repair." 

The mischief dreaded was, that the administra;- 
tion party would take advantage of the insolent 
and outrageous conduct of the French minister to 
show the folly of precipitancy, and to gain popu- 
larity and strength for itself. Madison soon 
writes to Jefferson to acquaint him with the re- 
action taking place in Virginia, " in the surprise 
and disgust of those who are attached to the 
French cause, and who viewed this minister as 
the instrument for cementing, instead of alien- 
ating the two Republics." He asserts that " the 
Anglican party is busy, as you may suppose, in 
making the worst of everything, and in turning 
the public feelings against France and thence in 
favor of England." In a sense this must have 
been true. The " fi seals," the " Anglomanys," 
the " Anglican party," the " monarchists " — 
which were Mr. Madison's pet names for his old 
friends — were good enough politicians to take 
great satisfaction in keeping well stirred and in 
lively use the muddy waters into which their op- 



212 JAMES MADISON. 

ponents had floundered. They were not, proba- 
bly, careful always to remember that France was 
neither the better nor worse, neither the wiser nor 
the less wise, because one of the mad fanatics, 
bred of the Revolution, had found his way, unfor- 
tunately, to the United States as a minister plen- 
ipotentiary. But, on the other hand, it was not 
true that there was any " Anglican party," in the 
sense in which Madison used the term ; — a party 
led by men who were " the enemies of France 
and of liberty, at work to lead the well-meaning 
from their honorable connection with those [the 
French people] into the arms and ultimately into 
the government of Great Britain." Washington 
said that he did not believe there were ten men 
in the United States, whose opinions deserved any 
respect, who would change the form of govern- 
ment to a monarch3^ But if there were only ten 
men in the country whose opinions, in the esti- 
mate of Jefferson and Madison, were not worth 
much, ^yashington was among them. The affec- 
tion and reverence, with which he was regarded 
by the people, they would have been glad to ap- 
peal to on behalf of their own party ; but it is 
easy to read between the lines in Jefferson's 
" Ana," and in his and Madison's correspondence, 
that they looked upon the President as the dupe 
of his Secretary of the Treasury. Not that they 
were ever wanting in terms of respect and even 
of veneration for the President, but the tone was 



FRENCH POLITICS. 213 

often one of pitiful regret almost akin to con- 
tempt. 

" I am extremely afraid," Madison wrote to 
Jefferson, " that the President may not be suffi- 
ciently aware of the snares that may be laid for 
his good intentions by men whose politics at bot- 
tom are very different from his own." Again he 
says, a few days later, " I regret extremely the 
position into which the President has been thrown. 
The unpopular cause of Anglomauy is openly lay- 
ing claim to him. His enemies, masking them- 
selves under the popular cause of France, are play- 
ing off the most tremendous batteries on him. . . . 
It is mortifying to the real friends of the Presi- 
dent that his fame and his influence should have 
anything to apprehend from the success of liberty 
in another country, since he owes his preeminence 
to the success of it in his own. If France tri- 
umphs, the ill-fated proclamation will be a mill- 
stone, which would sink any otlier character and 
will force a struggle even on his." Yet it is cer- 
tain that Washington was not in the least doubt as 
to his own political principles ; that he was never 
in danger of being inveigled into the betrayal of 
those principles, whatever they might be, and that 
he was quite capable of due care for his own rep- 
utation. 

If Madison did not know that these tears over 
Washington, if sincere, were quite uncalled for, 
Jefferson was not in the least deceived. He re- 



214 JAMES MADISON. 

cords in his " Ana " that the President, referring 
to certain articles that had recently appeared in 
Freneau's " Gazette," said that " he considered 
those papers as attacking him [Washington] di- 
rectly ; for he must be a fool indeed to swallow 
the little sugar-plums here and there thrown out 
to him. That in condemning the administration 
of the government they condemned him, for if they 
thought there were measures pursued contrary 
to his sentiments, they must conceive him too 
careless to attend to them, or too stu23id to under- 
stand them." Again, some months later, the Pres- 
ident, alluding to another article in Freneau's pa- 
per, — that " rascal Freneau," as he called him, — 
said, " that he despised all their attacks on him 
personally, but there never had been an act of the 
government — not meaning in the executive line 
onl}^ but in any line — which that paper had not 
abused. He was evidently sore and warm," con- 
tinues the candid Secretary, " and I took his in- 
tention to be, that I should interpose in some way 
with Freneau, perhaps withdraw his appointment 
of translating clerk in my office. But I will not 
do it." 

These frank and indignant avowals of feeling 
and opinion were not, if we may believe Jeffer- 
son, unusual with Washington, even in cabinet 
meetings ; and it seems hardly likely that Madi- 
son, who was on the most friendly and intimate 
terms with the President, could have been so igno» 



FRENCH POLITICS. 215 

rant of how lie felt and thought, as to suppose him 
the mere dupe of designing men. The truth is, 
probably, that Madison did not, any more than 
Jefferson, believe this. It was only a bit of party 
tactics to assume, lest the President should have 
too much influence over the minds of the people, 
that, in the hands of the wicked " Anglicists," he 
was as clay in the hands of the potter. The two 
friends, whether in writing or by speech they la- 
mented and excused the unhappy position, as they 
were pleased to call it, of the President, must 
have appeared to each other like the Roman au- 
gurs in G^rome's picture. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

HIS LATEST YEAES IN CONGRESS. 

Genet was at last got rid of, but the evil that 
he did lived after him. His presence had pro- 
voked an outbreak, to some degree, of the phe- 
nomena of the French Revolution, which, however 
significant they might be in the upheaval of an 
old monarchical despotism, were an unwholesome 
growth among a simple people, where one man 
was as good as another before the law ; where, 
from the first settlement of the country, all had 
largely possessed the advantages of a popular gov- 
ernment ; and where any other than a republican 
government for the future was well-nigh impos- 
sible. For men to address each other as " citi- 
zen," as if the word had the new significance in 
America that it had just gained in France ; to 
swear eternal fidelity to liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity, as if these were lately discovered rights, 
which had been denied the common people for 
centuries by kings and nobles, who had always 
lived in the next street in inconceivable luxury 
wrung from the blood and sweat of the poor ; to 
form Jacobin Clubs pledged to the suppression of 



HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 217 

the tyranny of aristocrats in a country where, as 
Samuel Dexter said of New England, there was 
hardly a man rich enough to own a carriage, and 
few so poor as not to own a horse ; for men thus 
to ape those revolutionary ways, which meant so 
much in Paris, may have seemed at the moment, 
to sober-minded people, more fantastic than harm- 
ful. It was harmful, however, insomuch as it sub- 
stituted sentiment for common sense, and made 
enthusiasm, not reason, the guide of conduct. A 
character was given to political conflict which ob- 
tained for years to come. There was, it is true, a 
certain manliness about it in remarkable contrast 
with that maudlin sentimentality of our time, 
which is rather inclined to ask pardon of the reb- 
els of the late civil war for having put them to 
the trouble of getting up a rebellion. It was a 
conflict, nevertheless, more of party passion than 
of principle, wherein it is impossible to see that 
either party was absolutely right, or either abso- 
lutely wrong. The Francomania phase of it dis- 
appeared for a time in John Adams's administra- 
tion ; but it revived again, and gave intensity and 
virulence to the political struggles, in the first de- 
cade of this century. Then it was that men went 
about their daily affairs with cockades on their 
hats as distinctive party badges. In their social 
as well as in their business relations they were 
governed by party affinities. Neighbors differing 
in politics would hardly speak to each other, and 



218 JAMES MADISON. 

each was always ready to accept the other's polit- 
ical crookedness as the measure of his possible de- 
pravity in everything else. They would hardly 
walk on the same side of the street ; or sail in the 
same packet ; or ride in the same stage-coach ; or 
buy their groceries at the same shop ; or listen to 
the preaching of the gospel from the same pulpit ; 
indeed, if the preacher was known to have pro- 
nounced political opinions, he was held, by those 
who did not agree with him, as one from whose 
shoulders the clerical gown should be torn. 

Gratitude to France had not yet even become 
traditional, and it was intensified by the deepest 
sympathy for a people struggling for what, by 
their aid, Americans had so recently gained. 
Added to this was the old hatred to England, which 
England as carefully nursed as if it were her set- 
tled policy, by exciting Indian hostilities on the 
borders, by outrages on the high seas, and b}^ an 
interference with American commerce, exercised 
with as little consideration of the rights of an inde- 
pendent nation as if the States were still colonies 
in revolt. Never did a party find, ready-made and 
close at hand, so many elements of popularity ; and 
these being appealed to as Genet appealed to them, 
it was easy to set the country in a blaze. When 
the Administration was determined that he should 
be recalled, and the Republican leaders were anx- 
ious to get rid of him, as they could not restrain 
him, Jefferson opposed, in a meeting of the cabinet^ 



HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 219 

the proposition to ask for his recall, lest such pop- 
ular indignation should be aroused as would en- 
able the French minister to defy the Government 
itself. The seed sowed by such a man, on such a 
soil, bore fruit a thousand-fold for almost a gener- 
ation. It is not to be wondered at that the Fed- 
eralists could not long hold their own against a 
party that did not ask the people to think, but 
bade them only to remember, — much, indeed, 
that ought to be remembered, — and to feel. 
That is always so much easier to do than the other, 
and it is always so much easier to appeal effectu- 
ally to sentiment than to reflection, that the won- 
der rather is that the Federalists could hold their 
own so long as they did. All things were against 
them but one. Washington, though altogether 
above any partisan bias, as he believed to be the 
imperative duty of the chief magistrate of the na- 
tion, conducted his administration by the princi- 
ples which distinguished the Federalists. He was 
neither, as he intimated to Jefferson, so careless 
as not to know what was done, nor such a fool 
as not to understand why it was done ; and so 
greatly was he revered for his exalted character, 
so universal was the confidence in his integrity, 
sagacity, and sound judgment, that, so long as he 
remained President, the party that surrounded him 
was immovable as a mountain. His policy was 
to stave off a rupture with England, and, if pos- 
sible, to bring that power into pacific and rational 



220 JAMES MADISON. 

relations with the United States. The govern- 
ment aimed to keep itself clear of entanglement 
with all foreign politics ; to maintain that perfect 
neutrality which should violate no treaties, offend 
no national friendships, provoke no jealousies, and 
leave England and France to fight their own bat- 
tles, content that the United States should be an 
impartial spectator. Thirty years afterward, when 
the Federal party had ceased to exist under that 
title, this was announced as the true American 
policy, and was thenceforth known as " The j\Ion- 
roe Doctrine," though the merit, even of re-dis- 
covery, did not belong to President Monroe. 

In nine cases out of ten, perhaps in ninet3"-niiie 
out of a hundred, the wisest statesmanship is the 
knowledge when and how to compromise. Cer- 
tainly that was all John Jay, whom the President 
sent to England to make a treaty, could do. The 
treaty was a bad one ; that is, it was not such an 
one as any President and Senate would have dared 
to consent to for the last sixty years ; it was not 
so good an one as that which Monroe and Pinkney 
negotiated ten years later, and which President 
Jefferson, lest it should help England and hurt 
France, then quietly locked up in his desk with- 
out permitting the Senate even to know of its ex- 
istence ; nor was it so bad as the treaty of peace 
made with Engrland in 1814, But it was undoubt- 
edly the best that could be done at the time. The 
question was between it and nothing ; and the 



HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 221 

best its warmest defenders could say was, that it 
was better than nothing. No treaty meant war ; 
and war at that moment with England meant 
ruin. At least so the Federalists thought, and, so 
far as human foresight could go, they were prob- 
ably right. 

But never was a treaty more unpopular than 
this, when its provisions came to be understood. 
The government, in delaying to make it public, 
seemed to fear for its reception, and by that hesi- 
tation helped to raise the very doubts it was afraid 
of. But when it was published the whole South 
was aroused, as one man, on finding that the pay- 
ment for fugitive slaves, who during the war of 
the Revolution had sought refuge with the Brit- 
ish army, was not provided for. Other concessions 
made to England were, in other parts of the coun- 
try, deemed not less humiliating and injurious to 
the national honor than this refusal to pay for 
runaway negroes. Also, there was a one-sided 
stipulation relating to commerce in the West In- 
dies, so injurious to American interests that the 
President and Senate, rather than ratify it, de- 
termined to reject the whole treaty and take the 
consequences. There was hardly a town of any 
note that did not hold its indignation meeting. 
Jay was burned in effigy, or the attempt was made 
so to express the public disapprobation, in more 
than one of the larger towns. Hamilton, when 
at a public meeting in New York he tried to 



222 JAMES MADISON: 

explain and defend the treaty, was stoned and 
compelled to retire. If the more violent oppo- 
nents of the Administration were to be believed, its 
members, from the President down, and all the 
leading men of the party supporting it, were 
bought by " British gold," or were ready without 
being bought, but from pure original depravity, 
to betray their own country and help to destroy 
France. The name of the ingenious inventor of 
the argument of "British gold," then used for the 
first time, has unfortunately been lost ; but it 
has stood the test of a hundred years' usage, and 
is as startling and conclusive to-day as it was a 
century ago. 

There soon came, however, the sober second 
thought which took into consideration the circum- 
stances under which the treaty was made, the pos- 
sible, and even probable, consequences of its rejec- 
tion, as well as the objections to the treaty itself. 
After the first excitement had passed away, many 
thought it worth while to read for themselves 
what hitherto they had only reviled at the sugges- 
tion of others, or from sympathy with the popular 
clamor. The commercial community, the New 
York Chamber of Commerce leading the way, 
came to the conclusion that their rights and in- 
terests were reasonably protected; that to be rec- 
ognized as a neutral between two such belligerent 
powers as England and France was a great point 
gained; that partial indemnity was better than. 



HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 223 

total loss ; and that the chance of a fairly profita- 
ble trade in the future was preferable to the ruin 
of all foreign commerce. It was universally 
agreed that peace was better than war ; but there 
was this difference between the two parties ; 
while one maintained that war was not a neces- 
sary consequence of the rejection of the treaty, the 
other declared it must be inevitable, where there 
were so many points of collision which could only 
be escaped by mutual agreement. This was espe- 
cially true on the frontier, where Indian hostilities 
were sure to follow, and lead to general war, if the 
military posts, which should have been given up at 
the close of the Revolution, should reniain longer 
in the hands of the English. 

But, after all, the real question with the Repub- 
licans was the influence which a treaty with Eng- 
land might have upon the relations of France and 
the United States. They detested England for her 
own sake ; they detested her still more for the 
sake of France. If there had been no question of 
France in the way they would, perhaps, have been 
willing, like the Federalists, to consider the rela- 
tions of England and the United States on their 
merits ; — to remember that the commerce be- 
tween them was greater than that which the 
United States had with any other country, the 
loss of which might be a disastrous check to her 
prosperity ; that the peoples of the two countries 
were, after all, of one blood, and that theirs was 



224 JAMES MADISON. 

a common heritage in tlie institutions, laws, lan- 
guage, and character that distinguished the race ; 
that the quarrel between them was — though it 
might be the more bitter on that account — a 
family quarrel, and ought, for that reason, to be 
the more speedily settled. But, if England w^ould 
not remember these things — as she never has to 
this day — if, on the contrary, she chose to be 
overbearing, contemptuous, insolent, quite regard- 
less of American rights — as she always has been 
when she could be so safely — then it behooved 
the United States, inasmuch as she was a young 
and as yet a feeble nation, to conciliate this pow- 
erful enemy whenever she could do so consist- 
ently with her self-respect, to avoid giving un- 
necessary offense or provoking fresh injuries, and, 
in the meanwhile, to nurture and husband her 
strength, to keep an accurate account of all the 
wroncfs that in her weakness she should be com- 
pelled to submit to, and to bide her time. These 
were the principles of the Federalists. Their aim 
was not the good of England, but the good of the 
United States. They were an American party ; 
to them foreign relations were of importance 
mainly for the influence these might have upon 
the prosperity, happiness, and power of their own 
country. They did not forget the gratitude due 
to France for the aid she had given to the strug- 
gling colonies, though that aid was given not so 
much for love of America as for hatred of Eng- 



HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 225 

land. The j^acific and friendly relations already 
established with France they held in due esti- 
mation ; and their sympathies went out to her 
people in full measure in their struggle for a pop- 
ular government, so long as that struggle was 
kept within the bounds of reason and humanity. 
But sympathy with, and gratitude to France did 
not blind them to the wisdom and expediency of 
pacific and friendly relations with England, pro- 
vided such could be established without the sacri- 
fice of their own prosperity, independence, and 
national pride. It was only to add to that pros- 
perity, to gain new security for that independence, 
and to build up a nation of which they and their 
children, to the latest generation, might well be 
proud, that they ought to be on good terms with 
that powerful state with w^hom they were co-heirs 
in all the ideas and institutions constituting the 
civilization that made her great. They hoped to 
build up, west of the Alantic Ocean, " an Inglishe 
Nation " in its broadest sense, of which Walter 
Raleigh had hoped that he might live to see the 
beginning, and which the latest historical writers 
in England are just now recognizing as the most 
important part of the modern empire of the Eng^ 
lish race. 

The House of Representatives was not in ses- 
sion when the Jay treaty was ratified by the 
President and Senate ; but Mr. Madison's letters 
show that he could see in it nothing but evil. In 

15 



226 JAMES MADISON. 

February, 1796, the ratification by both govern- 
ments was announced to both Houses of Congress, 
and measures were at once taken by the Repub- 
licans in the lower House to render the treaty, if 
possible, null and void. A resolution, warmly 
supported by Mr. Madison, was offered, calling 
upon the President for copies of the instructions 
uuder which Mr. Jay acted, with the correspond- 
ence and any other papers, proper to be made 
public, relating to the negotiation. The resolution 
was subjected to a debate of three weeks, but was 
finally passed. The request was refused by the 
President on the ground that the treaty-making 
power was, by the Constitution, confided to the 
President and Senate. It was on this point 
mainly that the debate had turned ; and the Pres- 
ident in support of his opinion, as well as that of 
the Federalists generally, referred to his recollec- 
tion of the plain intention of the Constitutional 
Convention ; and to the fact that a proposition, 
" that no treaty should be binding on the United 
States which was not ratified by law," was " ex- 
plicitly rejected." Mr. Madison said, a day or 
two after, that, while he did not doubt " the case 
to be as stated, he had no recollection of it." Of 
the message itself he said, that it was " as unex- 
pected as its tone and tenor are improper and in- 
delicate." But Hamilton, he thought, wrote it, 
and the President was, as usual, lamented over for 
having been taken in. A resolution, however, was 



HIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 227 

finally passed in favor of the treaty, though by a 
majority of three only. The debate upon it was 
earnest and long, Mr. Madison leading the oppo- 
sition. His disappointment was bitter. " The 
progress of this business throughout," he wrote to 
Jefferson, " has been to me the most worrying 
and vexatious that I ever encountered ; and the 
more so, as the causes lay in the unsteadiness, the 
follies, the perverseness, and the defections among 
our friends, more than in the strength, or dexter- 
ity, or malice of our opponents." 

Though the Jay treaty was not — as was said 
on a previous page — such an one as the United 
States would liave acceded to in latter times, the 
result proved it to be a wise and timely measure. 
Notwithstanding the disturbed condition of affairs 
in Europe, its influence upon the United States, 
and the increasing violence of faction here, the in- 
crease for the next ten or twelve years of the com- 
merce, and the consequent growth and prosperity 
of the country, were greater than the most sanguine 
supporters of the treaty had dared to hope for. 
Their immediate expectations that it might be 
possible to establish better relations with England, 
without disturbing essentially those existing with 
France, were, however, signally disappointed. 
Their opponents were wiser ; for they not only 
measured accurately the indignation of the French 
by their own, but they took good care that it 
should not languish for want of encouragement* 



228 JAMES MADISON. 

The French Directory might have been reconciled 
to the situation had it been phiin to them that 
there was neither an " Anglicized " party nor a 
French party in the United States, but that the 
people were united in the determination to main- 
tain, for their own protection, whatever their per- 
sonal sympathies might be, an absolute neutrality 
between the belligerent powers. But as they 
were assured that their friends in America meant 
also to be their effectual allies, so they believed 
that those who professed neutrality used it only 
as a mask for friendship to England. 

James Monroe had been received in Paris as 
American minister, literally as well as morally, 
with open arms, in that memorable scene when, in 
the presence and amid the cheers of the National 
Convention, the President, Merlin de Douai, im- 
printed upon his cheeks, in the name of France, 
the kiss of fraternity. Till he was recalled in the 
latter days of Washington's administration, Mon- 
roe was the representative, not so much of the gov- 
ernment to which he owed allegiance, as of the 
faction to which he belonged at home. He was 
not, it is true, unmindful of the hundreds of out- 
rages perpetrated by French naval vessels and pri- 
vateers upon American merchantmen ; that their 
crews were thrown into French prisons, and that 
the detention of their cargoes had brought ruin 
upon many American citizens ; nor did he neglect 
to demand redress. But he seemed absolutely in- 



EIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 229 

capable of understanding that if there were any- 
thing to choose between the insults and wrongs 
which America was compelled to submit to from 
England and France, it was only in the greater 
ability of England to inflict them. English ships 
swept the ocean, and pretexts were never wanting 
for overhauling American vessels, stripping them 
of some of their men, or confiscating both ships and 
cargoes. France had as many pretexts and quite 
as good a will to enforce them ; but she had fewer 
ships, and for that reason, and that only, did rather 
less damage. 

But however earnest Monroe was in insisting 
upon the rights of neutrals, in urging upon the 
French ministry the strict observance of treaty 
obligations, and in complaining of the constant 
injuries done in their despite, there was another 
thing about which he was far more earnest. He 
was as anxious to aid the French to baffle, if pos- 
sible. Jay's negotiations in London as if he were 
uncovering a plot against his own government. 
When the ratification of the treaty was made 
known in Paris, the indignation of the Directory 
was hardly kept within bounds. The Minister of 
Foreign Affairs notified Monroe that the Directory 
considered the stipulations of the treaty of 1778 
as altered and suspended in their most essential 
parts by this treaty with England. Under any 
circumstances the French would, no doubt, have 
resented the establishment of friendly relations be- 



230 JAMES MADISON. 

tween the United States and the old enemy of 
France, with whom she, at that moment, was en- 
gaged in a war arousing more than the bitter in- 
herited enmity of the two peoples. But the course 
Monroe had seen fit to pursue had done much to 
assure the French that the strong party in the 
United States, which he represented, would never 
permit the virgin Republic to be delivered, as it 
was assumed the treaty did deliver her, bound and 
gagged into the hands of the power which Jeffer- 
son loved to call " the harlot England." The first 
enthusiasm of the Revolution was fast growing 
into cant in both countries, and the language of 
devotion to liberty, equality, and fraternity was 
beginning to lose all meaning. But it was easy 
to be deceived by the assurances, more significant 
in actions than in words, of an official representa- 
tive, that the American people, save an Anglicized 
and decreasing minority, were the friends, and 
meant to be the allies, of France. Of course the 
French were all the more exasperated because 
they had permitted themselves to be deluded. 
Monroe was first rebuked by his own government 
for neglecting to do all that might have been done 
to reconcile the Directory to a treaty between the 
United States and Great Britain ; and soon after, 
his conduct continuing unsatisfactory, he was re- 
called. 

It is, of course, possible that the French Direc- 
tory were not misled; that nothing would have 



EIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 231 

reconciled them to the British treaty ; and that 
their subsequent course would have been the 
same, had they believed the American people 
were desirous to be on good terms with England 
solely for their own tranquillity and interest, and 
not at all because any large portion of them were 
at enmity with France. This, however, would not 
be a valid excuse for Monroe's course as a repre- 
sentative of his government. The only defense 
for him is, that he was deceived by his friends at 
home ; they must share, therefore, the responsibil- 
ity for his conduct, inasmuch as they encouraged 
a man, not over strong in mind or character and 
more likely to be governed by impulse than by 
good judgment, to abuse the confidence placed in 
him by the Administration. 

From an}' share in this responsibility, however, 
Madison must be relieved. He was in very con- 
stant correspondence with Monroe, and kept him 
carefully advised as to the progress of the treaty. 
No man desired its defeat more earnestly than he, 
and he believed that a majority of the people 
were opposed to it. But he evidently doubted its 
rejection from the first, and his discussion of pos- 
sibilities in his letters to Monroe was always frank 
and discriminating. In the end he accounted for 
the vote in its favor in the House of Representa- 
tives by the activity and influence of its friends, 
which its opponents wanted the ability or the 
time to overcome. It is probable that his col- 



232 JAMES MADISON. 

leagues of his own party in the House did not 
agree with him that public opinion was against 
the treaty, as it was by votes from their side that 
its acceptance was carried. 

With the ensuing session of Congress, at the 
close of Washington's administration, Madison's 
congressional service ended. The leadership of 
the opposition, whatever may be thought of its 
influence upon the welfare of the country, or of 
the personal motives by which he may have been 
governed, had devolved upon him, almost from the 
beginning, b}^ natural selection of the fittest for 
that position. It was not an easy place to take, 
either by one's owm choice or by the suffrages of 
others ; for at the head of the administration to 
be opposed stood the man most revered by a 
grateful countr}^ surrounded by men among those, 
at least, who w^ere best known for their past ser- 
vices and most esteemed for their ability and char- 
acter. It was the more difficult for one whose 
personal relation to the President was that of the 
warmest friendship ; to whom the President w^as 
accustomed to turn for counsel and even for guid- 
ance ; and who, being among those eminent men 
to whom the people owed their new Constitution, 
was counted upon to strengthen the union of the 
States and build up a strong and stable govern- 
ment. He played his difficult part, nevertheless, 
with dignity; if not brilliant, he was alwa3^s 
ready with the best reasons that could be given 



EIS LATEST YEARS IN CONGRESS. 233 

for the measures he supported ; and his zeal was 
invariably tempered with a wise moderation and 
a courtesy toward opponents, which made him al- 
ways respected, and sometimes feared for reserved 
force, in debate. 

Somewhat more than a yea,r before his retire- 
ment from Congress Mr. Madison had married, 
and it is quite possible that this may in part have 
moved him to seek rest in the tranquillity of a 
country life. Tradition says that Mrs. Madison 
was a beautiful woman. She has in our time been 
a marked figure in the society of Washington, and 
many remember her for her fine presence, her 
powers of conversation, and that beauty which 
sometimes belongs to the aged, though it may not 
have been preceded by youthful comeliness. Her 
maiden name was Dolly Payne, and her parents 
were members of the Society of Friends. When 
Madison married her she was Mrs. Todd, the 
widow of John Todd, a lawyer of Philadelphia. 
Her age at this time was twenty-six years, Mr. 
Madison being forty- three, and she survived him 
thirteen years, dying in 1849. On her tombstone 
she is called " Dolley ; " but Mr. Rives, in his life 
of her husband, ever mindful of the proprieties, 
calls her " Dorothea," or rather, Mrs. Dorothea 
Payne Madison ; for, like the Vicar of Wakefield, 
he loved to give the whole name. 



CHAPTER XV. 

AT HOME. — "RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99." 

Mr. Madison, in retiring for a time from pub- 
lic office, did not lose his interest in public affairs. 
Of few Americans can it be said with more truth, 
that he had a genius for politics, and the sub- 
ject, wherever he might be, was never out of his 
mind. There is not much else in the volumes 
of his published letters, while there is just enough 
else to show that in these he said all he had to 
say about anything. His more ambitious writ- 
ings, the papers in " The Federalist," the essay 
on The British Doctrine of Neutral Trade, liis con- 
troversial articles in the newspapers under various 
pseudonyms, are all political, all able, and all of 
great value as a part of the history of the times. 
Those which are controversial, however, must be 
taken, like his letters, as aids to knowledge rather 
than as definite conclusions to be accepted with- 
out question. It does not detract from the value 
of these letters, however, that they are written 
from the point of view of a party leader. Affairs 
of only temporary importance sometimes loom up 
before him merely because of their influence upon 



AT UOME. 235 

some immediate party movement ; and others of 
far-reaching consequences, which have no such 
bearing, escape his notice altogether ; but the 
reader soon learns that he may, at any rate, con- 
fide in the sincerity of the writer, and accept as 
freely the reasons given for his course as they are 
frankly stated. 

Of the literary value of his writings, aside from 
their historical interest, there is not much to be 
said, though Mr. Madison always wrote, even in 
his letters, as if writing for posterity. He was 
not felicitous in the use of language ; the style is 
turgid, heavy with resounding words of many syl- 
lables, unillumined by any ray of imagination, 
any flash of wit or of humor ; and the sentences 
are often involved and badly put together. But 
there is a genuineness, an evident sincerity of pur- 
pose, in all he wrote, and occasionally an expres- 
sion of deep feeling, which are always impressive. 
We search for glimpses of his private life and 
character in such letters, for they are not easily 
apparent. In one sense he had no private life, or, 
at least, none that was not so subordinate to his 
public career that there was little in it either sig- 
nificant or attractive. There is, in this respect, 
a marked contrast between his correspondence 
and that of Jefferson. There was, possibly, a lit- 
tle affectation in Jefferson's frequent assertions of 
his intense desire for the quiet of the country and 
the tranquillity of home, and of his distaste for the 



236 JAMES MADISON. 

turmoils and anxieties of public office. But he 
was certainly fond of country-life with the leisure 
to potter about among his sheep and his trees ; to 
watch the growth of his wheat and his clover ; to 
contrive new coulters for his plows ; to talk of phi- 
losophy, of the Social Contract, of mechanics, and 
of natural history ; if he was averse to public 
life it was not because political power and distinc- 
tion were a burden to him, except as they brought 
with them strife and unpopularity which truly his 
soul loathed for himself, though he rather liked 
to set other people by the ears. His private life 
was unquestionably as full of interest to himself 
as it is entertaining to look upon in the uncon- 
scious revelation of his own letters. 

But with Madison it was apparently quite 
otherwise. He unbent with difficulty. Always 
solemn and dignified, it was rather painful than 
pleasant to him to stoop to the petty matters of 
every-day existence. He had no small affecta- 
tions, and was not forever asserting that he was 
without ambition ; as if that, without which no- 
bodv is of much use in the world either to him- 
self or to others, were a weakness akin to deprav- 
ity. With brief intervals, covering only a few 
months altogether, he was where he best liked to 
be, from his entrance upon public life in 1775 till 
he stepped down in 1817 from that political ele- 
vation beyond which there are no ascending steps. 
During these forty-two years he found a certain 



AT HOME. 237 

enjoyment m a country home for a little while at 
a time, but it was chiefly the enjoyment of needed 
rest from official labor. The price of tobacco and 
the promise of the wheat crop interested liim 
then, but only as they interested him always as a 
source of his own income, and as the index to the 
general prosperity. At the end of a letter upon 
political matters, he announces with satisfaction 
that his Merino ewe has dropped a lamb and both 
mother and offspring are as well as could be ex- 
pected ; but it was probably Mr. Jefferson's grati- 
fication rather than his own that he had in mind, 
for it was Mr. Jefferson who had imported the 
sheep. Again, in a similar letter,. he takes a lit- 
tle remaining space to express a hope that Mr. 
Jefferson may permit the use of the rams of that 
flock to improve the breed of the native stock; 
not, apparently, that he cared so much about 
wool, as that ho wished to show a courteous and 
friendly interest in one of Mr. Jefferson's many 
projects for the improvement of things generally. 
It was during the year of comparative leisure 
after he left Congress that Mr. Madison probably 
built his house at Montpellier, about which some 
question has been started recently. A house at 
that time he certainly was building, and it is not 
likely that he ever employed himself in that way 
more than onc^ Scattered among discussions of 
Alien and Sedition Laws, the war in Europe, free 
goods in neutral ships, and other public topics, are 



238 JAMES MADISON-. 

brief allusions to lathing nails which he depended 
upon Mr. Jefferson to supply ; that gentleman 
having recently set up a machine for their manu- 
facture, which, however, like a good many other 
of his contrivances, seems to have had a hitch in 
it. So also he asks the Vice-President to see to 
it, that, when the window-glass and the pullies 
are forwarded, the " chord " for the latter shall 
not be forgotten ; and orders for other articles, 
only to be found in Philadelphia, are sent to his 
obliging friend. Mr. Jefferson, it is easy to be- 
lieve, found them rather the most interesting part 
of the political letters to which they were ap- 
pended ; and he was quite willing, no doubt, to 
relieve the tedium of presiding over the Senate by 
searching through the Market Street shops for the 
latest improvements in builders' hardware. To 
Mr. Monroe, Madison wrote that, as he is sending 
off a wagon to fetch nails for his carpenters, " it 
will receive the few articles which you have been 
so good as to offer from the superfluities of your 
stock, and which circumstances will permit me 
now to lay in." Evidently he was getting ready 
to go to housekeeping with his young wife. Mon- 
roe's stock of household goods had been replen- 
ished, perhaps by importations from France on 
his recent return, and he was disposing of his old 
supplies, by gift or sale, among,- his neighbors. 
Madison, at any rate, sends this modest list of 
what he would like to have : " To wit, two table- 



AT ROME. 239 

cloths for a dining-room of about eighteen feet ; 
two, three, or four, as may be convenient, for a 
more limited scale ; four dozen napkins, which 
will not in the least be objectionable for having 
been used ; and two mattresses." It was not an 
extravagant outfit, even though it had not been 
meant for one of those lordly Virginia homes of 
which some modern historians give us such 
charming pictures. " We are so little acquaint- 
ed," — Mr. Madison continues in that stately way, 
which nothing ever surprised him into forgetting, 
— " we are so little acquainted with the culinary 
utensils in detail that it is difficult to refer to such 
by name or description as would be within our 
wants." 

But pots and kettles, — though that may not be 
the name they were known by in Virginia, — ta- 
ble-cloths and mattresses, however moderate in 
number, are sure indications that the house, which 
was to be his residence when he should be content 
to retire from public service, was finished early in 
1798. He had rested long enough, and was busy 
that year in attendance upon the State Assembly 
at Richmond, to which he consented the next year 
to be returned as a member. Perhaps it was be- 
cause he could not keep longer out of the fray. 
Perhaps he felt called to a special duty. Affairs, 
foreign and domestic, were in a critical condition. 
France, in her resentment at the Jay treaty, had 
committed so many fresh outrages upon American 



240 JAMES MADISON. 

commerce; had so exasperated the American peo- 
ple by these outrages ; and by refusing to receive 
the ministers from the United States, had so in- 
sulted them and the government they represented 
in the proposed arrangements, — disclosed in the 
X. Y. Z. correspondence, — that all friendly rela- 
tions between the two countries had ceased, and it 
had seemed impossible that war could be avoided. 
For a while the popular sympathy was entirely 
with Mr. Adams's administration, and the prom- 
ise could hardly be fairer that the Federalists, if 
they managed wisely, might remain in power and 
be sustained by the whole country. But in some 
respects they were as unw^ise as in others they 
were unfortunate. President Adams, though pos- 
sessing many great qualities, was of too irascible 
and jealous a temper to be a successful leader or 
a good ruler. But there were other men of dis- 
tinction among the Federalists who were hardly 
less fond of having their own way than the Presi- 
dent was of having his. The incompatibility of 
temper w^as not altogether on one side in that 
family quarrel. But all were equally responsible 
for such a blunder as the enactment of the Alien 
and Sedition Laws. The provocation, it is true, 
was unquestionably great. Refugees from abroad 
had crowded to the United States, many of whom 
were professional agitators, and some were very 
sorry vagabonds. Whatever reason they might 
have had for fomenting discontent with govern- 



''RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99.'' 241 

ment in England or in France, there was nothing 
to justify any such violent measures in this coun- 
tr3\ But from their conduct as political partisans, 
particularly as newspaper editors, they soon came 
to be looked upon by the Federalists — for they 
all joined the other party — as a dangerous class. 
There grew up a feeling that it would be wiser 
for civil affairs to remain, in city, state, and na- 
tion, in the hands of those who were born and ed- 
ucated under republican institutions, and not to fall 
altogether under control of those who were alien 
in blood and religion, and who were inclined to 
look upon politics, not in the light of the citizen's 
duty to the common weal, but as an easy and 
profitable calling where the least scrupulous scoun- 
drel could gather the largest share of spoils. It 
may be that the authors of those laws were so de- 
termined to forestall the apprehended evils of such 
a dispensation because use had not accustomed 
them, as it has later generations of American citi- 
zens, to live under it in humility if not content. 
Or, perhaps, they wanted that profound faith of 
our time that the longer this subversion of gov- 
ernment is submitted to, the easier it will be to 
get back to the rule of the honest and wise. 

But, at any rate, whatever their reasons, they 
meant by these laws relating to aliens to put the 
acquirement of citizenship under more stringent 
regulations and to check the growth and promul- 
gation of seditious doctrines. If it be true, as is 
16 



242 JAMES mad/son: 

sometimes maintained with some plausibility, that 
citizens, to be intrusted with self - government, 
should be endowed with a certain degree of intelli- 
gence and virtue, then the aim of the framers of 
the laws, in the first case, was a good one ; and in 
the second case, the country has had some experi- 
ence in later times which tends to show that they 
were not altogether wrong in believing that doc- 
trines and practices which may lead to insurrection 
and civil war might best be met, so far as is pos- 
sible, at the outset. Nevertheless, the laws, under 
the circumstances of the time, were ill-considered 
and injudicious. For one reason, they put an effi- 
cient weapon into the hands of the opposition at a 
moment when it was at a loss where to turn for 
one. " Anglicism " and " British Gold " were blun- 
derbusses which, in the present popular irritation 
against France, had, for a time, lost their useful- 
ness, and were apt to miss fire. But an appeal to 
a generous and impulsive people on belialf of the 
unfortunate refugees, who had fled from the tyr- 
anny of the old world to find liberty and a home 
in the new, was sure to be listened to. A good 
many, besides those Avho assumed that republi- 
canism and the rights of man were in their spe- 
cial keeping, believed that an unfortunate class 
had been dealt with hastily, and even cruelly. 
The clamor, once begun, told heavily against the 
Federalists. They could be denounced now, not 
only as the enemies of liberty in France, but as 



*' RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99.'' 243 

refusing it to men of any nation or any race who 
should seek it in the United States, — it being, of 
course, understood that races of black or yellow 
complexion need not apply. It was, indeed, ad- 
vanced as an argument against one of the acts, — 
wliich gave the President power to order out of 
the country all aliens whose presence lie thought 
dangerous, — that it might be used to prevent the 
importation of persons from Africa. On this 
point Mr. Gallatin, a native of Switzerland, was 
exceedingly anxious lest there be a violation of 
the Constitution. But the outrage upon the 
rights of man here apprehended was the right of 
white men to make black men slaves. 

Against the enactment of these laws Mr. Jeffer- 
son did nothing as Vice-President. But whatever 
was his motive for official inaction, it was not be- 
cause he approved them. He wrote the Kentucky 
" Resolutions of '98,"-^ the strongest protest that 
could be made against them, and to be thence- 
forth held by nullifiers and secessionists as their 
covenant of faith. But he acted secretly, taking 
counsel only with George Nicholas of Kentucky 
and William C. Nicholas of Virginia (brothers), 
and, Hildreth says, " probably with Madison." 
The resolutions were To be offered in the Ken- 
tucky legislature by George Nicholas, and, with 
some modifications, were passed by that bodv in 
November. A year afterward other resolutions 
were passed to reassert the opinions of the pre- 



244 JAMES MADISON. 

vions session and to record against the laws the 
"solemn protest" of the legislature; and further 
declaring " that a nullification by those sovereign- 
ties [the States] of all unauthorized acts done un- 
der color of that instrument [the Constitution] is 
the rightful remedy." In the resolutions which 
Mr. Jefferson had prepared for Nicholas the year 
before this essential doctrine is found in that por- 
tion wliich Nicholas had omitted, in these words — 
" where powers are assumed which have not been 
delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful 
remedy." As originally prepared the resolutions 
were found in Jefferson's handwriting after his 
death. Hildreth's conjecture that Madison, as 
well as the brothers Nicholas, was consulted in 
the preparation of these resolutions, rests only on 
circumstantial evidence. The Kentucky Resolu- 
tions were passed in November ; those of Virginia 
in December ; the former were written by Jeffer- 
son, the latter by Madison ; and the doctrines in 
each are essentially the same. It would have 
been a perfectly natural thing for the two friends 
to consult together upon a measure of so much 
importance ; there is no reason why they should 
not have done so ; and these coincidences suggest 
that they probably did. Jefferson clearly shirked 
the responsibility of an act which he knew would 
endanger the Union ; but Madison made no se- 
cret, so far as can be seen now, of his going to 
Richmond, though not a member of the Assem* 



''RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99.'' 245 

bly, apparently for the express purpose of writing 
these resokitions and urging their adoption. But 
Jefferson was not a man of courage even in doing 
that wdiich he believed to be wise. In Madison, 
it was only the conscience that was timid ; and 
having once convinced himself that the thing he 
proposed to do was right he was always ready to 
face the consequences. It may be that neither of 
them foresaw that the real importance of this par- 
ticular act was rather prospective than imme- 
diate ; and if so their conduct is to be measured 
by its instant purpose. If Jefferson meant then 
and there to dissolve the Union, or even to weaken 
the constitutional bond that held it together, he 
was not over-cautious in keeping out of sight. 
But if Madison's intention was to strengthen the 
Union by withstanding what he believed to be a 
perilous violation of the Constitution, then his 
courage, though it is to be commended, is not to 
be wondered at. That, he said, was his motive, 
and to defend the resolutions and his own part in 
regard to them was the chief interest and serious 
labor of the latter years of his life. He was 
elected a member of the Assembly for the session 
of 1799-1800, probably because he and his friends 
thought his official presence desirable when the 
subject should again come up for consideration at. 
the reading of the replies from other States, to all 
which the resolutions had been sent. The report 
on those replies was also written by him, and the 



246 JAMES MADISON. 

position taken the year before Avas therein reaf- 
firmed, explained, and elaborated at length. 

In 1827-28 the doctrines of nullification and of 
secession were assumed to be the legitimate co- 
rollary of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions 
of 1798 and 1799. Jefferson was dead; but 
Madison felt called upon to deny, in his own de- 
fense and in defense of the memory of his friend, 
that there was any similarity between them. 
From 1830 to 1836 his mind seems to have been 
chiefly occupied with this subject, upon which he 
wrote many letters, and a paper of thirty pages, 
entitled " On Nullification," which bears the date 
of 1835-36, the latter year being the last of his 
life. He resents the charge of any political in- 
consistency in the course of his long career, and 
most of all such an inconsistency as would im- 
pugn his attachment to the Constitution and the 
Union. The Resolutions of 1798, he maintains, 
do not and were not meant to assert a right in 
any one State to arrest or annul an act of the 
General Government, as that is a right that can 
only belong to them collectively. Nullification 
and Secession he denounces as " twin heresies," 
that "ought to be buried in the same grave." 
" A political system," he declares, " which does 
not contain an effective provision for a peaceable 
decision of all controversies arising within itself, 
would be a government in name only. He as* 
serts that " the essential difference between a free 



*' RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99:' 24^1 

government and governments not free, is that the 
former is founded in compact, the parties to which 
are mutually and equally bound by it. Neither of 
them, therefore, can have a greater right to break 
off from the bargain, than the other or others 
have to hold them to it. . . . It is high time that 
the claim to secede at will should be put down by 
the public opinion." What, — he writes to another 
friend, — " what can be more preposterous than to 
say that the States, as united, are in no respect or 
degree a nation, which implies sovereignty ; . . . 
and on the other hand, and at the same time, to 
say that the States separately are completely na- 
tions and sovereigns ? . . . The words of the Con- 
stitution are ex^Dlicit, that the Constitution and 
laws of the United States shall be supreme over 
the Constitution and laws of the several States ; 
supreme in their exposition and execution, as well 
as in their authority. Without a supremacy in 
these respects, it would be like a scabbard, in the 
hand of a soldier, without a sword in it." Abra- 
ham Lincoln might have said this twenty-eight 
years later when he determined that his first duty 
as President was to suppress insurrection. 

Such is the drift of the many pages Mr. Madi- 
son wrote upon the subject during the last five or 
six years of his life. He looked then, whatever 
he may have thought in the closing years of the 
preceding century, upon the United States as a 
nation, and not as a confederacy having its parts 



248 JAMES MADISON. 

held togetlier only by " a treaty or league " called 
a constitution. But his object is to show that 
there is nothing inconsistent in the resolutions of 
1798 with these opinions upon the sovereignty 
of the United States ; that he held them just as 
strongly then as he held them now ; and that 
they, and he as their author, looked to the States 
as a whole, not to a single State, to find and ap- j 
ply a remedy in a constitutional wa}^, for an un- 
constitutional measure of which an administra- 
tion of the government might be guilty. His 
position is maintained with all the acuteness, in- 
genuity, and logical skill which mark his earlier 
writings. There is no sign of failure of mental 
power, of which those accused him who could not 
answer him. Such an imputation he resented 
with as much indignation as he did a charge of 
inconsistenc}^ which here could only mean false- 
hood. There is no possibiUty, tiien, of misunder- 
standing his opinions during the last six years of 
his life ; and the world has no right to doubt his 
repeated and earnest assurances that these were 
his opinions when he wrote the resolutions of 
1798. It can only be said that the construction 
he gave them, thirty years afterward, is opposed 
to the universal understanding of them at the 
time they were written. 

But if his defense of himself be considered com- 
plete, it is not even specious when presented on 
behalf of Jefferson. Mr. Madison wrote in 1830 : 



''RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99:' 249 

" That the term ' nullification ' in the Kentucky 
Resolutions belongs to those of 1799, with which 
Mr. Jefferson had nothing to do. . . . The resolu- 
tions of 1798, drawn by him, contain neither that 
nor any equivalent term." It was not then gen- 
erally known, whether Mr. Madison knew it or 
not, that one of the resolutions and part of an- 
other which Jefferson wrote to be offered in the 
Kentucky legislature in 1798 were omitted by 
Mr. Nicholas, and that therein was the assertion 
already quoted — " where powers are assumed 
which have not been delegated, a nullification of 
the act is the rightful remedy." The next year, 
when additional resolutions were offered by Mr. 
Breckenridge, this idea in similar, though not in 
precisely the same language, was presented in the 
words — " that a nullification by those sovereign- 
ties [the States] of all unauthorized acts, done 
under color of that instrument, is the rightful 
remedy." In 1832, this fact, on the authority of 
Jefferson's grandson and executor, was made pub- 
lic ; and further, that another declaration of Mr. 
Jefferson's in the resolution not used was an ex- 
hortation to the co-States, " that each will take 
measures of its own for providing that neither 
these acts nor any others of the general govern- 
ment, not plainly and intentionally authorized by 
the Constitution, shall be exercised within their 
respective territories." All this must have been 
known to Mr. Madison then, if not before. Yet 



250 JAMES MADISON. 

three years later, in his paper " On Nullification," 
under the date of 1835-36, he wrote : " The amount 
of this modified right of nullification is, that a 
single State may arrest the operation of a law 
of the United States. . . . And this new-fangled 
theory is attempted to be fathered on Mr. Jeffer- 
son, the apostle of republicanism." It would be j 
charitable here to believe that there was some 1 
lapse of memory in these latter days, and that he 
had forgotten that Jefferson was, above all things, 
his own words being witness, the apostle of nul- 
lification. 

The Alien and Sedition Laws — of which the 
more obnoxious of the former was never enforced, 
and the latter expired by limitation in two years 
— had their influence in the presidential election 
of 1800. But it was due more to differences be- 
tween the President and some of the leaders of 
the Federal party that that party lost its hold upon 
power, never to be regained. With the election 
of Jefferson, Madison entered upon another sphere 
of duty, which was politically a promotion, but 
where his influence, if it was so large, was not so 
evident as when an active leader of his party. It 
was at Mr. Jefferson's " pressing desire," Mr. 
Madison himself says, in a letter written many 
years afterward, that he took the office of Secre- 
tary of State. In the same letter he explains 
that he had declined an executive appointment 
under Washington, because, in taking a seat in 



''RESOLUTIONS OF '98 AND '99." 251 

the House of Representatives, he would be less ex- 
posed to the imputation of selfish views in the 
part he had taken in "the origin and adoption 
of the Constitution ; " because there, if anywhere, 
he could be of service in sustaining it against its 
adversaries, especially as it was, " in its progress, 
encountering trials of a new sort in the formation 
of new parties attaching adverse constructions to 
it." The latter reason seems to be one of those 
happy after-thoughts which public men not un- 
frequently flatter themselves will anticipate a 
question they would prefer should not be asked. 
Mr. Madison was a member of the First Congress 
from the first day it met, before the new Constitu- 
tion had encountered new trials from new parties 
by any constructions either one way or the other. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

SECRETARY OF STATE. 

On the morning of March 4, 1801, Mr. Jeffer- 
son tied his horse to the fence and walked alone 
into the Capitol to take the oath of oflSce as Presi- 
dent. Mr. Madison was not present at that per- 
functory ceremony, the death of his aged father 
detaining him at home. He soon after, however, 
assumed the duties of the station to which Mr. 
Jefferson had called him, and there he remained 
till he took the presidential office, in his turn, eight 
years afterward. 

The new dynasty entered upon its course under 
happy circumstances. There was, of course, much 
to fear from the condition of affairs in Europe; 
for the United States must needs be in a perilous 
position so long as the struggle for supremacy 
continued between France and England, and that 
would be while Napoleon could command an 
army. But the danger of war with France was no 
longer imminent, since Mr. Adams had wisely re- 
established friendly relations, though many of the 
leading Federalists believed it was at the cost of 
ruin to his own party. English aggressions upon 



SECRETARY OF STATE. 253 

American commerce had for the moment ceased; 
as fourteen years afterward they ceased altogether, 
when the provocation disappeared with the per- 
manent estabHshment of peace in Europe. In the 
temporary lull of the tempest the sun shone out 
of a serene sky, and the land was blessed with 
quiet and prosperity. "Peace, commerce and 
honest friendship with all nations, entangling alli- 
ances with none," the President said in his inaugu- 
ral address, were among " the essential principles 
of our government, and consequently those which 
ought to shape its administration." The condi- 
tion of the country was in accord with the thought 
and may even have suggested it. " We are all 
Kepublicans ; we are all Federalists," said Jeffer- 
son in his inaugural ; it was meant, however, as 
an avowal of a tolerant belief in the patriotism of 
both parties, rather than, as has sometimes been 
supposed, an assertion that party lines, so clearly 
drawn in the election, were at length obliterated. 
But hardly a year had passed before this seemed 
to be almost literally true. One after another 
States hitherto Federal, both at the North and at 
the South, went over in their state elections to the 
Republican or Democratic party ; till, with the 
exception of Delaware, there was not a single 
Federal State outside of New England ; and even 
in that stronghold one State, Rhode Island, had 
marched off with the majority. "Everywhere," 
wrote Madison in October, " the progress of the 



254 JAMES MADISON. 

public sentiment mocks the cavils and clamors of 
the malignant adversaries of the Administration." 
If it may not be asserted that this overthrow of 
the Federal rule was fortunate at that juncture, — 
as nothing is more idle in history than speculation 
upon what mighfc have been, — it may at least 
be said that Jefferson's administration for his 
first four years was a happy one for his country 
and acceptable to his countrymen. None since 
Washington's has ever been so popular ; and no 
other, except Lincoln's, has ever been so success- 
ful. Nor can it be said of it that it was a happy 
period because it is without a history ; for it in- 
cluded acts of moment, accepted then with an ap- 
probation and enthusiasm which time has justified. 
Not less shallow is that view of his character 
and of those years of his administration, taken 
by many of his contemporaries, who neither loved 
nor respected him, and who attributed his suc- 
cess and his popularity to his good fortune. This 
was a favorite and easy way, among his political 
opponents, of explaining a disagreeable fact. Par- 
ton notes in his Life, that C. C. Pinckney could 
only understand Jefferson's hold upon public con- 
fidence as " the infatuation of the people." John 
Quincy Adams said : ^' Fortune has taken a pleas- 
ure in making Jefferson's greatest weaknesses and 
follies issue more successfully than if he had been 
inspired with the profoundest wisdom." " When 
the people," said Gouverneur Morris, " have been 



SECRETARY OF STATE. 255 

long enough drunk, they will get sober, but while 
the frolic lasts, to reason with them is useless." 
There has been more than one occasion of late 
years, and in more than one place, where this may 
be truly said of popular political enthusiasm ; but 
it was not true of that which prevailed for the 
first four years of this century ; and Mr. Adams's 
sarcasm can hardly fail to recall the fact, that 
when Mr. Jefferson, in his second term, was really 
guilty of a great folly in adhering to a prolonged 
embargo, it was Mr. Adams who committed one of 
the few follies of his own life in abandoning his 
party to give his support to the President's blun- 
der. 

Though there were many changes in Mr. Jeffer- 
son's cabinet in the course of eight years, they 
were not the result of dissensions. Yet he was, 
perhaps, more an absolute President than any 
other man who has ever held that position. He 
sought and listened to counsel, no doubt ; but 
taking it was another matter. He certainly did 
not take it if it did not suit him ; and if it was 
not likely to suit him, he was in no hurry to ask 
for it. It was in his own fertile brain, not in the 
su^frestions of others, that important measures 
had their birth. That trait in his character, which 
phrenologists have named secretiveness, largely 
governed his actions. It was natural for him to 
bring things about quietly and skillfully by set- 
ting others to do what he wanted done, without 



256 JAMES MADISON. 

himself being seen ; though sometimes there was 
no other motive than the mere gratification of se- 
cretiveness. He preferred often to suggest meas- 
ures quietly to congressmen rather than to Con- 
gress, though the result in either case might be 
the same. At other times, where the end to be 
attained was of great importance and he was ab- 
solutely^ sure only of himself, he boldly took the 
responsibility, as he did in the purchase of Louisi- 
ana, and in the suppression of the Monroe-Pinck- 
ney treaty with England in his second term. It 
is not surprising, therefore, that Madison's part, 
during the eight years of Jefferson's presidency, 
is found to be more a secondary one than is usual 
with a Secretary of State, or than was usual with 
him. He was in perfect accord with his chief, 
who held always in the highest esteem his knowl- 
edge and judgment, and sought, no doubt, his 
sound and moderate advice when he thought he 
needed advice from anybody. But Madison's in- 
fluence is less visible in Jefferson's administration 
than in Washington's, when he was in the oppo- 
sition. Washington, where he doubted his own 
ability to decide a question and felt the need of 
enlicrhtenment, was accustomed to call in Madi- 
son, though he did not always accept his friend's 
conclusions. It was rarely that Jefferson was 
troubled with any doubt of his own jadgment in 
the discussion or decision of any question that 
might come before him. 



SECRETARY OF STATE. 257 

The most important measure of his administra- 
tion was peculiarly his own, and when once de- 
termined upon it was pushed to a conclusion with 
vigor and courage. Nobody doubts now, or has 
doubted since the abolition of slavery, that the 
purchase of Louisiana was an act of sound states- 
manship. Jefferson did not foresee that the ac- 
quisition of that fertile territory would stimulate 
a domestic trade in slaves, as profitable to the 
slave-breeding as to the slave-consuming States ; 
or that, as slavery increased and brought prosper- 
ity and power to a class, there would grow up an 
oligarchy, resting on ownership in negroes, which, 
within sixty years, would have to be uprooted at 
an enormous cost. But his aim was to secure the 
peaceful possession of the Mississippi territory on 
both its banks, as a permanent settlement of a 
question which, so long as it remained open, was 
a perpetual menace of war with one or another 
European power. That danger would always in- 
volve the possibility of the Appalachian range 
becoming the western boundary of the United 
States ; in which case the valley of the Missis- 
sippi, and the vast region west of it, would fall 
into the power of an alien people. So far was 
plain to Mr. Jefferson ; but the result of the re- 
bellion of 1861 proves that he was wiser than he 
knew when he acquired the territory stretching 
to the Sabine and the foot of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, for the occupation of a free people. 
17 



258 JAMES MADISON. 

It is not necessary to repeat here the story of 
the purchase. The news of it reached Washing- 
ton in July and was received with enthusiasm. 
That there was no warrant in the Constitution 
for an acquisition of territory by purchase was 
manifest ; and Mr. Jefferson's opponents were not 
in the least backward in heaping reproaches and 
ridicule upon the great champion of strict con- 
struction, who had no hesitation in violating the 
Constitution when it seemed to him wdse to do 
so. Both the President and his Secretary frankly 
met the accusation by acknowledging its entire 
justice ; but at the same time they put in, as a 
sufficient defense, the plea of the general welfare. 
This did not abate the ridicule, though the argu- 
ment was a hard one for the Federalists to with- 
stand ; for it could not be forgotten that it was 
on this ground that Hamilton, as Secretary of the 
Treasury, had justified the imposition of certain 
taxes, and the Republicans had maintained that 
the plain limitations of the Constitution could not 
be overstepped on such a plea, even for the gen- 
eral good. Jefferson was so sensitive to this con- 
stitutional objection that he proposed to meet it 
by an amendment to the Constitution ; but it was 
soon evident that the unwritten law of manifest 
destiny did not need the appeal to the ballot-box. 
" The grumblers," Jefferson wrote to a friend 
soon after the news of the treaty was received, 
" gave all the credit of the acquisition to the ac- 



SECRETARY OF STATE. 259 

cident of war." " Tliey would see," he added, in 
records on file " that though we could not say 
when war would arise, yet we said with energy 
what would take place when it should arise." 
He only meant by this, probably, that from the 
beginning of his administration he had been pre- 
pared to take advantage of circumstances when 
war should break out again between England and 
France, as it was evident enough to the whole 
world that it must break out sooner or later. 
That the particular conjunction of circumstances, 
however, would occur that did occur, could not 
have been foreseen. Jefferson could have had no 
prescience that Spain would reconvey Louisiana 
to France; that Napoleon would enter at once 
upon extensive preparations for colonization on 
the banks of the Mississippi ; and that he would 
be willing to relinquish this important step in his 
great scheme of a universal Latin Empire, that 
he might devote himself to the necessary prelimi- 
nary work of subduing his most formidable enemy 
of the rival race. But it is Jefferson's best title 
to fame that he was ready to take advantage of 
this conjunction of incidents at exactly the right 
moment. Doubtless, the progress of civilization 
would have been essentially the same had he 
never been born. But having been born it fell to 
him to contribute largely to the events that have 
distributed the race speaking the English tongue 
the most widely over the globe, and to exercise a 



260 JAMES MADISON. 

powerful influence upon the age. It does not de- 
tract from the merit of his act, however, that he 
by no means saw all its importance nor even 
dreamed of its consequences. The region beyond 
the Mississippi, he thought, might be made useful 
as a refuge for Indian tribes of the East ; but he 
neither saw, nor could see, then that the purchase 
of Louisiana was the essential, though only the 
preliminary, step toward the occupation of the 
continent to the Pacific by the English race. 
The expedition of Lewis and Clarke, which he 
sent out the next year, was in the interest of sci- 
ence, and especially of geography, rather than of 
any possible settlement of that distant region. 
Indeed, he said that if the new acquisition of ter- 
ritory were wisely managed, so as to induce the 
eastern Indians to cross the great river, the result 
would be the " condensing, instead of scattering, 
our population." But " man proposes and God 
disposes." 

The immediate consequences, however, of the 
acquisition of Louisiana were enough to bring al- 
most universal popularity to the President, es- 
pecially at the South and West, without any rev- 
elation of the future. Nor was the act the less 
popular because it was an immediate stimulus to 
the foreign slave-trade, partly because at the 
North that excited but little interest, and partly 
because at the South it excited a great deal. The 
abolition societies, it is true, asked that the impor- 



SECRETARY OF STATE. 261 

tation of slaves from Africa into the annexed ter- 
ritory should be forbidden ; and an act was passed 
prohibiting their introduction, except by those 
persons from other parts of the United States who 
intended to be actual settlers, and were, therefore, 
permitted to bring slaves imported previous to 
1798. But the law might properly have been 
entitled an Act for the Encouragement of the 
Trade in Negroes ; and so it seems to have been 
regarded by the older slave States. South Caro- 
lina reopened the trade to Africa, and as Con- 
gress failed to levy the constitutional tax of ten 
dollars a head, the raw material, so to speak, 
came in free. The rest could be safely left to the 
law of supply and demand. Neither South Caro- 
lina, nor any other State, had imported slaves 
since 1798. The whole slave population, there- 
fore, could be legally taken into Louisiana by act- 
ual settlers, and its place supplied in the old 
States by new importations. The demand regu- 
lated the supply, and the supply came from Af- 
rica as truly as if the importation had been direct 
to New Orleans. This was the legal course of 
trade till 1808 ; thenceforward it flourished with- 
out the protection of law but in spite of it, so long 
as it was profitable — so long, that is, as the nat- 
ural increase of the eastern negro was insufficient 
to answer the demand of the southwestern mar- 
ket. 

But besides the peaceful extension of the na- 



262 JAMES 31 AD IS ON. 

tional domain there was much else in the first four 
or five years of Jefferson's administration to com- 
mend it to his countrymen. His party had noth- 
ing to complain of, despite that genial and gener- 
ous assurance of the inaugural which could not be 
forgotten — " we are all Repubhcans ; we are all 
Federalists ; " and the other party had reason to 
be thankful that, considering, as he said, " a Fed- 
erahst seldom died, and never resigned," the num- 
ber was not large who were reminded, by their 
removal from office, of their unreasonable delay 
in doing either the one thing or the other. It 
was only the politicians, however, a class much 
smaller then than it is now, who were concerned 
in such matters ; the people at large were influ- 
enced by other considerations. Credit was given 
to the President for things that he did not do as 
well as for things that he did. It was due to him 
that the administration was an economical one; 
but it was through Mr. Gallatin's skillful manage- 
ment of the finances that the old public debt was 
in process of speedy extinction. Occasional im- 
peachments enlivened the proceedings of Con- 
gress, which otherwise were as harmless as they 
were dull. Jefferson was never so much out of 
his proper element as in war, yet a successful one 
was carried on, during his first term, with the 
Barbary States which put an end for many years 
to the exactions and outrages which had long been 
needlessly submitted to. It was a war, however, 



SECRETARY OF STATE. 263 

of only a few naval vessels in the hands of such 
energetic and brave men, destined to become fa- 
mous in later years, as Bainbridge, Decatur, 
Preble, and Barron ; and to send off the expedi- 
tion was about all the government had to do with 
it. It was easy to keep clear of " entangling alli- 
ances," or entanglements of any sort with Eu- 
ropean powers, so long as they left the commerce 
of the United States to pursue its peaceful and 
profitable course without molestation. Thisr both 
England and France did for several years, and 
there fell, in consequence, an immense carrying 
trade into the hands of American merchants 
which brought prosperity to the whole country, 
such as was never known before, and was not 
known again, after it was lost, for near a quarter 
of a century. All these things made Mr. Jeffer- 
son acceptable to the people as almost a heaven- 
appointed President. If, as John Quincy Adams 
thought, fortune delighted to beam upon him 
with her sunniest smiles, he knew, at least, how 
best to take advantage of them. While they 
lasted his Secretary of State sat in their light and 
warmth, quietly and contentedly busy and in the 
diligent and faithful discharge of official duty, 
which could not in those years of prosperous tran- 
quillity be over-burdensome. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE EMBARGO. 

Almost at the beginning of his second term, 
Jefferson found himself in troubled waters, as the 
United States was drawn slowly but surely into 
the vortex of European war. The carrying trade 
at home and abroad had fallen very much into 
the hands of Americans, and this became the root 
of bitterness. The tonnage of their vessels em- 
ployed in foreign trade and entered at the custom- 
houses of the United States was equal to nearly 
four fifths of the tonnage of British vessels en- 
gaged in the same traffic and entered at home. 
But there was this difference : the foreign com- 
merce of Great Britain was almost all carried on 
from her own ports, and the returns, therefore, 
showed its full volume. On the other hand, the 
American ships were largely the carriers between 
the ports of the belligerents and of other powers 
in Europe, and there were no entries at the Amer- 
ican custom-houses of their employment, or that 
they were employed at all. As early as 1804-05, 
the aggregate value of this foreign trade in the 
bands of Americans was probably much larger 



THB EMBARGO. '265 

than that controlled by English merchants ; and 
the former increased to the time of the promul- 
gation of the Berlin decree of 1806, and the Brit- 
ish orders in council of the next year. Nor was 
it only that wealth flowed into the country as the 
immediate leturn from this trade abroad. It stim- 
ulated enterprise and industry at home by the in- 
crease of capital ; and there was not only more 
money to work with, but more to spend. Conse- 
quently the increase in exports and in imports grew 
steadily. In 1805, 1806, and 1807, about one half 
the average total exports, something over the value 
of twenty million of dollars, went to Great Britain 
alone ; and the value of the imports from that 
country for the same period was about sixty mil- 
lion dollars a year. Nor did this disproportion, 
though increasing with the growing prosperity, 
represent a general balance of trade against the 
United States, as one school of political econo- 
mists would insist it must have done. For the 
imports were small from other European countries 
in exchange for American products ; and the dif- 
ference, together with the profits of the carrying 
trade abroad, was remitted in English manufac- 
tures. In other words, the imports from England 
represented the returns for all exports to Europe, 
and the returns also — available in the first in- 
stance through bills of exchange — of the trade 
which had been gained by Americans and lost by 
those nations whose ships the war had driven from 
the ocean. 



266 JAMES MADfSON. 

The British manufacturer had no reason for 
discontent with this state of things. The best 
market for his goods was constantly improving, 
and he did not much care who took them to Amer- 
ica. But the English government, and the Eng- 
lish merchants who owned ships, looked on with 
neither pleasure nor patience. It was impossible 
not to see that the United States was fast becom- 
ing a great commercial rival. This in itself was 
bad enough ; but it was the harder to bear when it 
was remembered — and it could not be forgotten 
— that the rivalry came from States so lately in 
revolt against England, and that their President at 
that moment was one of the most obnoxious of 
the rebels. Then what did it avail that England 
was mistress of the seas, if her formidable enemy 
could laugh at any effort of hers to destroy the 
commerce of France, so long as that commerce 
could be carried on in safety under a neutral flag ? 
If that flag must be respected, English naval ves- 
sels and privateers would cruise in vain for prizes, 
for the merchant ships of any belligerent, not 
strong enough to protect them, stayed in port. It 
had not yet come to be the acknowledged law of 
nations that free ships make free goods. But 
nearly the same purpose was answered, if the 
property of belligerents could be safely carried in 
neutral ships under the pretense of being owned 
by neutrals. The products of the French colonies, 
for example, could be loaded on board of Ameri- 



TEE EMBARGO. 267 

can vessels, taken to the United States and re- 
shipped there for France as American property. 
Enghmd looked upon this as an evasion of the 
recognized public law that property of belligerents 
was good prize. Accordingly when she saw that 
French commerce was thus put out of her reach, 
and that the rival she most dreaded was growing 
rich and powerful in the possession of it, she sought 
a remedy and was not long in finding one. 

It was denied that neutrals could take advan- 
tage of a state of war to enter upon a trade which 
had not existed in time of peace ; and American 
ships were seized on the high seas, taken into port, 
and condemned in the Admiralty Courts for car- 
rying enemy's goods in such a trade. The exer- 
cise of that right, if it were one by the recog- 
nized law of nations, would be of great injury to 
American commerce, unless it could be success- 
fully resisted. To show that it was not good 
law, Mr. Madison wrote his " Examination of 
the British Doctrine which Subjects to Capture a 
Neutral Trade not open in the Time of Peace." 
The essay was a careful and thorough discussion 
of the whole question, and showed by citations 
from the most eminent writers on international 
law, by the terms of treaties, and by the conduct 
of nations in the past, that the British doctrine 
was erroneous and would lead to other infringe- 
ments of the rights of neutrals. But argument, 
however unanswerable, has never yet brought the 



268 JAMES MADISON. 

British government to reason, unless there was 
something behind it not so easy to disregard. The 
appropriation for Mr. Jefferson's gunboats could 
not get that naval arm ready for effective service 
much before the year 1815, even if it could then 
be of use ; and there was, moreover, this further 
difficulty in the way of its efficiency at the time, 
— that as it could not go to the enemy, it must 
wait for the enemy to come to it ; the conflagra- 
tion would have to be brought to the fire-engines. 
A war with England must be a naval war; and 
the United States not only had no navy of any 
consequence, but it was a part of Mr. Jefferson's 
policy, in contrast with the policy of the preceding 
administrations, that there should be none, except 
these gunboats kept on wheels and under cover in 
readiness to repel an invasion. But there was no 
fear of invasion, for by that England could gain 
nothing. " She is renewing," Madison wrote in 
the autumn of 1805, "her depredations on our 
commerce in the most ruinous shapes, and has 
kindled a more general indignation among our 
merchants than was ever before expressed." 

These depredations were not confined to the 
seizing and confiscating American ships under 
the pretense that their cargoes were contraband. 
Seamen were taken out of them on the charge of 
being British subjects and deserters, not only on 
the high seas in larger numbers than ever before, 
but within the waters of the United States. No 



i 



TEE EMBARGO. 269 

doubt these seamen were often British subjects 
and their seizure was justifiable, provided Eng- 
land could rightfully extend to all parts of the 
globe and to the ships of all nations the merciless 
sj^stem of impressment to which her own people 
were compelled to submit at home. Monroe, in a 
note to Madison, said that the British minister 
had informed him that " great abuses were com- 
mitted in granting protections " in America, and 
acknowledged that " he gave me some examples 
which were most shameful." But even if it could 
be granted that English naval officers might seize 
such men without recourse to law, wherever they 
should be found and without respect for the flag 
of another nation, it was a national insult and out- 
rage, calling for resentment and resistance, to im- 
press American citizens under the pretense that 
they were British subjects. But what was the 
remedy ? As a last resort in such cases, nations 
have but one. Diplomacy and legislation may be 
first tried, but if these fail, war must 'be the final 
ordeal. For this the Administration made no prep- 
aration, and the more evident the unreadiness the 
less was the chance of redress in any other way. 
Immediate war would, of course, have been un- 
wise ; for what could a nation almost without a 
ship, hope from a contest with a power having the 
largest and most efficient navy in the world ? If 
this, however, was true from 1805 to 1807, it was 
not less true in 1812. But it need not have been 



270 JAMES MADISON. 

true when war was actually resorted to, had the 
intervening years been years of preparation. The 
fact was, however, that the party which supported 
the Administration was no more in favor of war 
at the earlier period than the Administration 
itself was ; and meanwhile, till a war-party" had 
come into existence and gained the ascendency, 
the country had been growing every year less and 
less in a condition to appeal to war. 

The first measure adopted to meet the aggres- 
sions of the English was an act prohibiting the 
importation of certain British products. This had 
always been a favorite policy with Madison. He 
had advanced and upheld it in former years, when 
a member of Congress, and when Great Britain 
had first violated the rights and dignity of the 
United States by interference with her foreign 
trade and by impressing her citizens. Non-inter- 
course had been an effective measure thirty years 
before, and had a kind of prestige as an American 
policy. It was not seen, perhaps could not be 
seen without experience, that a measure suited to 
the colonial condition was not sufficient for an 
independent nation. But the President and Sec- 
retary were in perfect accord ; for Jefferson pre- 
ferred anything to war, and Madison was per- 
suaded that England would be brought to terms 
by the loss of the best market for her manufac- 
tures. Others, and notably John Randolph, saw 
in the measure only the first step, which, if per- 



THE EMBARGO. 271 

sisted in, must lead to war ; while, in the mean- 
time, to interfere with importations would be quite 
as great an injury to the United States as to Great 
Britain. Randolph was apt to blurt out a good 
deal of truth when it happened to suit him. Im- 
pressment, he said, was an old grievance which 
had not been thought a sufficient provocation for 
war when the nation was not prepared ; and it 
was no more ready to resort to that desperate 
remedy now than it had been in the past. With- 
out a navy it would be impossible to prevent the 
blockading of all the principal American ports 
by English squadrons. The United States would 
need an ally, and he was not willing she should 
throw herself into the arms of that power which 
was seeking universal conquest. France, he said, 
would be the tyrant of the ocean, if the British 
navy should be driven from it. The commerce, 
moreover, which it was proposed to protect, was 
not the " honest trade of America ; " but " a 
mushroom, a fungus of war — a trade which so 
soon as the nations of Europe are at peace, will 
no longer exist." It was only " a carrying trade 
which covers enemy's property ; " and he did not 
believe in plunging a great agricultural country 
■ into war for the benefit of the shipping merchants 
of a few seaports. There were many who agreed 
with him ; for it was one of the cardinal principles 
of the Jeffersonian school of politics, that be- 
tween commerce and agriculture there was a nat- 
ural antagonism. 



272 JAMES MADISON. 

But the Administration did not rely upon legis- 
lation alone in this emergency. The President 
followed up the act prohibiting the introduction 
of British goods by sending William Pinkney to 
England in the spring of 1806, to join Monroe, 
the resident minister, in an attempt at negotiation. 
These commissioners soon wrote that there was 
good reason for hoping that a treaty would be con- 
cluded, and thereupon the non-importation act was 
for a time suspended. In December came the 
news that a treaty was agreed upon, and soon after 
it was received by the President. The most seri- 
ous difficulty in the way of negotiation had been 
the question of impressment. The British gov- 
ernment claimed the right to arrest deserters from 
its service anywhere outside the jurisdiction of 
other nations, and that jurisdiction, it was main- 
tained, could not extend beyond the coast limit 
over the open sea, the highway of all nations. 
There was an evident disposition, however, to come 
to some compromise. The English commission- 
ers proposed that their government should pro- 
hibit, under penalty, the seizure of American cit- 
izens anywhere, and that the United States should 
forbid, on her part, the granting of certificates of 
citizenship to British subjects of wliich deserters 
took advantage. But as this would be an acknowl- 
edgment virtually of the right of search on board 
American ships, and the denial of citizenship in 
the United States to foreigners, the American 



THE EMBARGO. 273 

commissioners could not entertain that proposi- 
tion. They were willing, however, if the assumed 
right to board American ships were given up, to 
agree, on behalf of their government, to aid in tlie 
arrest and return of British deserters when seek- 
ing a refuge in the United States. But to this 
the British commissioners would not accede. 

Monroe and Pinkney were enjoined, in the in- 
structions written by the Secretary of State, to 
make the abandonment of impressment the first 
condition of a treaty. A treaty, nevertheless, was 
agreed upon, without this provision. But when 
it was sent to the President, the ministers ex- 
plained : — 

"That, although this government [the British] did 
not feel at liberty to relinquish, formally, by treaty, its 
claim to search our merchant vessels for British seamen, 
its practice would nevertheless be essentially, if not com- 
pletely, abandoned. That opinion has since been con- 
firmed by frequent conferences on the subject with the 
British commissioners, who have repeatedly assured us 
that, in their judgment, we were made as sure against 
the exercise of their pretension by the policy which their 
government had adopted in regard to that very delicate 
and important question, as we could have been made by 
treaty." 

These assurances did not satisfy the President. 
Without consulting the Senate, though Congress 
was in session when the treaty was received, and 
although the Senate had been previously informed 

18 



274 JAMES MADISON. 

that one had been agreed upon, the President re- 
jected it. On several other points it was not ac- 
ceptable ; but, as Mr. Madison wrote to a friend, 
"the case of impressments particularly having 
been brought to a formal issue, and having been 
the primary object of an extraordinary mission, a 
treaty could not be closed which was silent on that 
subject." The commissioners, therefore, were or- 
dered to renew negotiations. This they faithfully 
tried to do for a year, but were finally told by the 
British minister that a treaty, once concluded and 
signed, but afterward rejected in part by one of 
the contracting powers, could not again be taken up 
for consideration. The opponents of the Admin- 
istration made the most of this action of Mr. Jef- 
ferson. The country was not permitted to forget, 
even were forgetfulness possible, that thousands 
of seamen had been taken from American vessels, 
and that the larger proportion of these were na- 
tive-born citizens of the United States. Not that 
these opponents wanted war ; that, they believed, 
would be ruinous without a navy, and therefore 
some reasonable compromise was all that could be 
hoped for. But what was to be thought of an ad- 
ministration that would not go to war because it 
was not prepared ; would not prepare in the hope 
that some future conjunction of circumstances 
would stave off that last resort ; and, meanwhile, 
would accept no terms which might at least miti- 
gate the injuries visited upon the sea-faring peo« 



THE EMBARGO. 275 

pie of the United States, and possibly relieve the 
nation from an insolent exercise of power which 
it was not strong enough to resent ? 

As Eno^land's need of seamen increased, the 
captains of her cruisers, encouraged by the failure 
of negotiation, grew bolder in overhauling Amer- 
ican ships and taking out as many men as they be- 
lieved, or pretended to believe, were deserters. In 
the summer of 1807 an outrage was perpetrated 
on the frigate Chesapeake, as if to emphasize the 
contempt with which a nation must be looked 
upon which only screamed like a woman at wrongs 
which it wanted the courage and strength to re- 
sent, or the wisdom to compound for. The Ches- 
apeake was followed out of the harbor of Norfolk 
by the British man-of-war Leopard, and when a 
few miles at sea, the Chesapeake being brought to 
under the pretense that the English captain wished 
to put some dispatches on board for Europe, a de- 
mand was made for certain deserters supposed to 
be on the American frigate. Commodore Barron 
replied that he knew of no deserters on his ship, 
and that he could permit no search to be made, 
even if there were. After some further alterca- 
tion the Enghshman fired a broadside, killing and 
wounding a number of the Chesapeake's crew. 
Commodore Barron could do nothing else but sur- 
render, for he had only a single gun in readiness 
for use, and that was fired only once and then with 
a coal from the cook's galley. The ship was then 






276 JAMES MADISON. 

boarded, the crew mustered, and four men arrested 
as deserters. Three of them were negroes, — two 
natives of the United States, the other of South 
America. The fourth man, probably, was an Eng- 
lishman. They were all deserters from English 
men-of-war lying off Norfolk ; but the three ne- 
groes declared that they had been kidnapped, and 
their right to escape could not be justly ques- 
tioned ; indeed, the English afterward took this 
view of it apparently, for the men were released 
on the arrival of the Leopard at Halifax. But 
the fourth man was hanged. 

For this direct national insult, explanation, 
apology, and reparation were demanded, and at 
the same time the President put forth a procla- 
mation forbidding all British ships of war to re- 
main in American waters. Of how much use the 
latter was we learn from a letter of Madison to 
Monroe : " They continue to defy it," he wrote, 
"not only by remaining within our waters, but by 
chasing merchant vessels arriving and departing." 
Some preparation was made for war, but it was 
only to call upon the militia to be in readiness, 
and to order Mr. Jefferson's gunboats to the most 
exposed ports. Great Britain was not alarmed. 
The captain of the Leopard, indeed, was removed 
from his command, as having exceeded his duty ; 
but a proclamation on that side was also issued, 
requiring all ships of war to seize British seamen 
on board foreign merchantmen, to demand them 



THE EMBARGO. 277 

from foreign ships of war, and if the demand was 
refused to report the fact to the admiral of the 
fleet. It was not till after four years of irritating 
controversy that any settlement was reached in 
regard to the affair of the Chesapeake. 

New perils all the while were besetting Amer- 
ican commerce. In November, 1806, Napoleon's 
Berlin decree was promulgated, forbidding the in-= 
troduction into France of the products of Great 
Britain and her colonies, whether in her own 
ships or those of other nations. This was in vio- 
lation of the convention between France and the 
United States, if it was meant that American 
vessels should come under the prohibition ; but for 
a time there was some hope that they might be 
excepted. In the course of the year, however, it 
was officially declared in Paris that the treaty 
would not be allowed to weaken the force of a war 
measure aimed at Great Britain. Under this de- 
cision cargoes already seized were confiscated and 
the trade of the United States faced a new calam- 
ity. The decree, it was declared, was a rightful 
retaliation of a British order in council of six 
months before, which had established a partial 
blockade of a portion of the French coast. In the 
kidnapping business, France could not, of course, 
compete with England ; for there were few of her 
c'.tizens to be found on board of American vessels, 
and to seize a Yankee sailor, under the pretense 
that he was a Frenchman, was an absurdity never 



278 JAMES MADISON. 

thought of. But hundreds of Americans, the 
crews of ships seized for violation of the terms of 
the Berlin decree, were thrown into French pris- 
ons. So far, therefore, as the United States had 
good ground of complaint on any score against 
either power, there was little to choose between 
them. Mr. Jefferson's repugnance to war was suf- 
ficient to hold him back from one with England, 
though he might have had France for an ally ; still 
more unwilling was he, by a war with France, to 
make a friend of England, whom he still looked 
upon as the natural enemy of the United States ; 
for, notwithstanding all that had come and gone, 
he still regarded France with something of the 
old affection. In the autumn of 1807 he called 
a special session of Congress in consideration of 
the increasing aggressions of Great Britain, espe- 
cially in the attack upon the Chesapeake, and the 
injury done by the interdiction of neutral trade 
with any country with which that power was at 
war. But he had no recommendations to offer 
of resistance nor even of defense, except that some 
additions be made to the gunboats, and that sailors 
on shore be enrolled as a sort of gunboat militia. 
The probable real purpose of calling the extra 
session, however, appeared in about two weeks, 
when he sent a special message to the Senate, rec- 
ommending an embargo. 

-An act was almost immediately passed, which, 
if anything more was needed to complete the ruin 



THE EMBARGO. 279 

of American commerce, supplied that deficiency. 
A month before this time the English ministry 
had issued a new order in council — the news of 
which reached Jefferson as he was about to send 
in his message — proclaiming a blockade of pretty 
much all Europe, and forbidding any trade in neu- 
tral vessels, unless they had first gone into some 
British port and paid duties on their cargoes ; and 
within twenty-four hours- of the President's mes- 
sage, recommending the embargo, Napoleon pro- 
claimed a new decree from Milan, by which it was 
declared that any ship was lawful prize that had 
anything whatever to do with Great Britain — 
that should pay it tribute, that should carry its 
merchandise, that should be bound either to or 
from any of its ports. All that these powers could 
do to shut every trading vessel out of all European 
ports was now done ; and at this opportune mo- 
ment Mr. Jefferson came to their aid by compelling 
all American vessels to stay at home. It is not 
easy in our time to conceive of a President propos- 
ing, or of a party accepting, or of the people sub- 
mitting to such a measure as this. But Mr. Jeffer^ 
son's followers were very obedient, and there was, 
undoubtedly, a very general belief that trade with 
the United States was so important to the nations 
at war, that for the sake of its renewal the obnox- 
ious decrees and orders in council would soon be 
repealed. But, except upon certain manufacturers 
in England, little influence was visible. General 



I 



280 JAMES MADISON. 

Armstrong, the American minister in France, 
wrote : " Here it is not felt ; and in England, 
amid the more recent and interesting events of the 
day, it is forgotten." When, however, the effect 
was evident at home of a law forbidding any 
American vessels from going to sea, even to catch 
fish, and prohibiting the export of any of the prod- 
ucts of the United States either in their own ships 
or those of any other country, then there arose 
a popular clamor for the abandonment of a policy 
so ruinous. Within four months of its enactment, 
Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts declared, in a de- 
bate in Congress, that " an experiment, such as is 
now making, was never before — I will not say 
tried — it never before entered into the human 
imagination. There is nothing like it in the nar- 
rations of history or in the tales of fiction. All 
the habits of a mighty nation are at once counter- 
acted. All their property depreciated. All their 
external connections violated. Five millions of 
people are engaged. They cannot go beyond the 
limits of that once free country ; now they are 
not even permitted to thrust their own property 
through the grates." While American ships at 
home were kept there, those which had remained 
abroad to escape the embargo were met by a new 
peril. Some of them were in French ports await- 
ing a turn in affairs ; others ventured to load with 
English goods in English ports, to be landed in 
France under the pretense, supported by fraudu- 



THE EMBARGO. 281 

lent papers, that they were direct from the United 
States or other neutral country. The fraud was 
too transparent to escape detection long, and Na- 
poleon thereupon issued, in the spring of 1808, the 
Bayonne decree authorizing the seizure and con- 
fiscation of all American vessels. They were either 
English or American, he said ; if the former they 
were enemy's ships and liable to capture ; but if 
the latter, they should be at home, and he was 
only enforcing the embargo law of the United 
States, which she ought to thank him for. 

The prosperity and tranquillity which marked 
the earlier years of Jefferson's administration dis- 
appeared in its last year. Congress, both in its 
spring and winter sessions, could talk of little else 
but the disastrous embargo ; proposing, on the one 
hand, to make it the more stringent by an enforce- 
ment act, and, on the other, to substitute for it 
non-intercourse with England and France, restor- 
ing trade with the rest of the world, and leaving 
the question of decrees and orders in council open 
for future consideration. The President no longer 
held his party under perfect control. The mis- 
chievous results of the embargo policy were evi- 
dent enough to a sufficient number of Republi- 
cans to secure ; in February, 1809, the repeal of 
that measure, to take effect the next month as to 
all countries except England and France, and 
with regard to them at the adjournment of the 



282 JAMES MADISON. 

next Congress. But the prohibition of importa- 
tion from both these latter countries was contin- 
ued till the obnoxious orders in council and the 
decrees should be repealed. 



CHAPTER XVIir. 

MADISON AS PBESIDENT. 

Mr. Jefferson named his own successor. Of 
the three Democratic candidates, Madison, Mon- 
roe, and George Clinton, he preferred Madison 
now, and urged Monroe to wait patiently as next 
in succession. Beyond two lives he did not, per- 
haps, think proper to dictate ; and, besides, Clin- 
ton was not a Virginian. What little opposition 
there was to Madison in his own party came from 
those who feared that he was too thoroughly iden- 
tified with Jefferson's policy to untie the knot in 
which the foreign relations of the country had be- 
come entangled. Of the 175 electoral votes, how- 
ever, he received 122 ; but that was fewer by 39 
than had been cast for Jefferson four years before. 
Of the New England States, Vermont alone gave 
him its votes, changing places with Rhode Island, 
which had wheeled into line again with the Fed- 
eralists. 

During the winter of 1808-09, after Madison's 
election but before his inauguration, he had qui- 
etly conferred with Erskine, the British minister 
at Washington, upon the condition of affairs. 



284 JAMES MAD/SON. 

Much was hoped from these conferences ; but the 
end which they helped to bring about was the re- 
verse of what was hoped for. Could Madison 
have had his way, he would probably have pre- 
ferred that Congress should have left untouched 
at that session the questions of embargo and non- 
intercourse ; for the tone of the debates and the 
tendency of legislation naturally led the English 
ministry to doubt the assurances which Erskine 
gave, that these proceedings did not truly rep- 
resent the friendly disposition of the incoming 
President. In answer to those representations, 
however, there came in April from Canning, the 
Foreign Secretary, certain propositions which were 
so presented by Erskine, and so received by the 
Administration, as to promise a settlement of all 
differences between the two governments. Er- 
skine was a young man, anxious very likely for 
distinction ; but a laudable ambition to be of ser- 
vice in a good cause made him over-zealous. He 
exceeded the letter of his instructions, wliile keep- 
ing, as he thought, to their spirit. Probably he 
mistook their spirit in assuming that his govern- 
ment cared more to secure a settlement of existing 
difficulties than for the precise terms and minor 
details by which it should be reached. At any 
rate he agreed that Great Britain would withdraw 
her orders in council provided the United States 
would maintain the non-intercourse acts against 
France so long as the Berlin and Milan decrees 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 285 

remained in force. This being secured, lie did not 
insist upon two other conditions — partly because 
it was represented to him that they would need 
some action by Congress, and partly because he 
believed that the essential point was gained b}^ an 
agreement on the part of the United States to en- 
force non-intercourse against France while her 
decrees were unrepealed. These other conditions 
were, first, that tlie United States should cease to 
insist upon the right to carry on in time of war 
the colonial trade of a belhgerent which had not 
been open in time of peace to neutrals ; and sec- 
ond, the acknowledgment that British men-of- 
war might rightfully seize American merchant 
vessels when transgressing the non-intercourse 
laws against France. He also proposed a settle- 
ment of the Chesapeake question, but omitted to 
say, as Canning had instructed him to say, that 
some provision would be made, as an act of gener- 
osity and not of right, for the wives and children 
of the men who were killed on board that ship. 
But when that settlement was accepted by the 
Administration, he failed to resent some reflections 
from Robert Smith, the Secretary of State, on the 
conduct of Great Britain in that affair, which 
Canning, when he heard of them, thought should 
have been resented and their recall demanded, or 
the negotiation stopped. 

On the terms, however, as Erskine chose to 
present them, an agreement was reached, and the 



286 JAMES MADISON. \ 

President issued a proclamation repealing the acts 
of embargo and non-intercourse as against Great 
Britain and her colonies after June 10. On that 
day more than a thousand ships, loaded and riding 
at anchor in all the principal ports in anxious 
readiness for the signal for flight, spread their 
wings, like a flock of long-imprisoned birds, and 
flew out to sea. There was an almost universal 
shout of gratitude to the new President, who, in 
the first three months of his administration, had 
banished the fear of war abroad, and at home was 
sweeping away involuntary idleness, want, and 
ominous discontent. Madison had known some- 
thing of popularity during his long career ; but . 
never before had he felt the exultation of riding ^ 
upon the very crest of a mighty wave of popular 
applause. But it was one of those waves that 
collapse suddenly into a surprising flatness. Can- 
ning repudiated all that Erskine had done and | 
immediately recalled him. The ships that had 
gone to sea, under the sanction of the President's 
proclamation, were permitted by an order in 
council to complete their voyages unmolested ; but 
otherwise all commerce was once more brought to 
a stand-still. It would have been easier to bear 
some fresh misfortune than to be compelled to 
struggle again with calamities so well understood 
and which it was hoped had been left behind for- 
ever, ^ladison and Gallatin, who had been re- 
tained in the Treasury Department and was the 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 287 

President's chief adviser, were accused of having 
been either imbecile or treacherous. It was 
openly said that they had led the young minister 
to agree to an arrangement which they knew his 
government would not sanction. But they could 
hardly have been so foolish as to make a bargain 
with the certainty tbat it would stand only so 
long as a ship could go and come across the At- 
lantic. Nobody understood better than Madison 
how grateful a reconciliation with England would 
be to a large proportion of the people, and nobody 
was more disappointed that the negotiations came 
to worse than nothing, inasmuch as their failure 
led to new embarrassments. 

He said with some bitterness, in a letter to Jef- 
ferson, early in August : " You will see by the in- 
structions to Erskine, as published by Canning, 
that the latter was as much determined that there 
should be no adjustment as the former was that 
there should be one." He was unjust to Can- 
ning ; the real fault was with Erskine, and with 
him only because his zeal outran his judgment. 
In another letter to Jefferson, the President says: 
" Erskine is in a ticklish situation with his gov- 
ernment. I suspect he will not be able to defend 
himself against the charges of exceeding his in- 
structions, notwithstanding the appeal he makes 
to sundry others not published. But he will 
make out a strong case against Canning, and be 
able to avail himself much of the absurdity and 



288 JAMES MADISON. 

evident inadmissibility of the articles disregarded 
by him." Possibly Mr. Erskine considered that 
his government would approve of his not urging 
these points too earnestly, inasmuch as the other 
side refrained from insisting upon the abandon- 
ment of impressment of seamen on board Ameri- 
can ships. But Mr. Madison's indignation must 
have covered up a good deal of mortification. He 
could hardly have been without the sensation of 
one hoisted by his own petard. It was only two 
years since Mr. Jefferson, with his approval, had 
rejected the Monroe - Pinkney treaty because in- 
structions had not been literally complied with. 
Mr. Canning, in following that example, could' i 
have pleaded, had he chosen, much the stronger 
justification, under the circumstances of the two 
cases ; and Mr. Madison could not fail to remem- 
ber, without being reminded of it, when this 
agreement was thrown back in his face, that he 
had been willing to accept it without any protec- 
tion of the rights of American seamen, the want 
of which was the ostensible reason for rejecting 
the Monroe-Pinkney treaty. 

However, the Administration was now com- 
pelled to meet anew the old diflBculties which the 
Erskine agreement had failed to dispose of. The 
President's first duty was to issue a second procla- 
mation, recalling the previous one which had sent 
to sea every American ship in port. They could 
all come back, if they would, to be made fast 



I 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 289 

again at their wharves, till the recurrent tides at 
last should ripple in and out of their open seams, 
and their yards and masts drop piecemeal upon 
the rotting decks. But man}^ never came back, 
preferring rather the risk of being sunk or burned 
at sea, which happened to not a few, or of cap- 
ture and confiscation by the belligerents whose 
laws they defied. Erskine w^as followed by a new 
ambassador from England, Mr. Jackson. His mis- 
sion, however, had no other result than to widen 
the breach between the two nations. A contro- 
versy almost immediately arose between the min- 
ister and Mr. Smith, the Secretary of State, — or 
rather Mr. Madison himself, who, as be com- 
plained at a later period, did most of Smith's 
work as well as his own, — touching the arrange- 
ment wdth Erskine. Jackson intimated, or was 
understood as intimating, that the Administration 
must have known the precise terms on which Er- 
skine was empowered to treat with the govern- 
ment of the United States ; and when a denial 
was made with a good deal of emphasis on the 
part of the Administration, the insinuation was re- 
peated almost as a direct charge. Of course there 
could be but one conclusion to correspondence of 
this sort; further communication with Jackson 
was declined and his recall asked for. 

It was plain enough in the latter months of Jef- 
ferson's administration, to himself as well as to 
everybody else, that the embargo had not only 

19 



290 JAMES MADTSON. 

failed to bring the belligerents to terms abroad, 
but that it had added greatly to the distress at 
home. That the measure was a failure, Madison 
himself acknowledged in one of his retrospective 
letters written in the retirement of Montpellier, 
sixteen years afterward. It was meant, he said 
in that letter, as an experimental measure, prefer- 
able to naked submission or to war at a time when 
war was inexpedient. It failed, he added, " be- 
cause the government did not sufficiently distrust 
those in a certain quarter whose successful viola- 
tion of the law led to the general discontent, which 
called for its repeal." That is to say, the govern- 
ment relied too confidently upon the submission of 
New England; was too ready to believe that her 
merchants would not let their ships slip quietly out 
to sea whenever they could evade the officers of the 
customs, nor slip in to land a cargo at some unfre- 
quented place where there w^as no custom-house. 
" The patriotic fishermen of Marblehead," he says, 
"atone time offered their services ; " and he re- 
grets they were not sent out as privateers to seize 
these contraband ships as prizes, and to " carry 
them into ports where the tribunals would en- 
force the law." Apparently there was not a rea- 
sonable doubt in his mind whether such tribunals 
could be found in any port along the coast of New 
England. It is also rather more than doubtful — 
even assuming that there was much of the kind 
of patriotism which, he says existed in Marblehead 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 291 

. how long, had the government offered commis- 

Bions to private citizens to prey upon their neigh- 
bors, the embargo would have been respected at 
all east of Long Island Sound. But this was the 
afterthought of 1826. Madison's pohcy in 1809- 
10 was rather to conciliate than provoke " those 
in a certain quarter." He could not command 
entire unanimity even in his own party. Con- 
gress passed the winter in vain efforts to find 
some common ground, not merely for Democrats 
and Federalists, but for the Democrats alone. 
Various measures were proposed to meet the crit- 
ical condition of the country. Some were too rad- 
ical ; some not radical enough ; and none were so 
acceptable that it was not easy to form combina- 
tions for their defeat. All were agreed that the 
non-importation act must be got rid of ; but the 
difficulty was to find a way to be rid of it so that 
the nation should at once maintain its dignity, as- 
sert its rights, and escape a war. The President 
would have preferred that all British and French 
ships be excluded from American ports, and that 
importations from both countries should be pro- 
hibited except in American vessels ; and a bill to 
this effect was one of several that was defeated in 
the course of the session. But at last, in May 
(1810), an act was passed excluding only the men- 
of-war of both nations, but suspending the non- 
importation act for three months after the ad- 
journment of Congress. The President was then 



292 JAMES MADISON. 

authorized, when the three months were passed, 
to declare the act again in force against either 
Great Britain or France, should the commercial 
orders or decrees of either nation be continued in 
force while those of the other were repealed. 

If the aim of the dominant party had been to 
devise a scheme sure to lead to fresh complications 
more diflBcult to manage than any that had gone 
before, it could not have hit upon a better one 
than this. Hitherto, in all the perplexities and 
anxieties of the situation, the government had, at 
least, kept its relations to other powers in its own 
hands, to conduct them, whether wisely or un- 
wisely, in its own way. It could resent or sub- 
mit to encroachments upon the commerce of tlie 
country as seemed most prudent; it could close 
or open the ports, as seemed most judicious ; or it 
could join forces with that one of its two enemies 
whose alliance promised to secure respect on the 
one hand, and compel it on the other. But now 
it had tied itself up in a knot of provisos. It 
would do something if England would do some- 
tiling else, or if France would do something else. 
If the proposition was accepted by England and 
was not accepted by France, then the United 
States would remain in friendly relations with 
England, and assume by comparison an unfriendlj^ 
attitude toward France-; and if France accepted 
the condition and England declined it, then the 
situation would be reversed. Nothing would be 



fe 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 293 

gained in either case that might not have been 
gained by direct negotiation, and, no doubt, on 
better terms. But if the proposition now offered 
should be disregarded by both powers, the situa- 
tion would be worse than before. This evidently 
was Madison's view of the question. He wrote to 
Pinkney, the minister at the Court of St. James, 
a month after the act was passed : " At the next 
meeting of Congress, it will be found, according 
to present appearances, that instead of an adjust- 
ment with either of the belligerents there is an 
increasing obstinacy in both ; and that the incon- 
veniences of embargo and non-intercourse have 
been exchanged for the greater sacrifices, as well 
as disgrace, resulting from a submission to the 
predatory system in force." Not that he wanted 
war; his faith in passive resistance was still un- 
shaken ; embargo and non-intercourse he was still 
confident would, if persisted in long enough, 
surely bring the belligerents to terms. But as to 
this act, he weighs the chances as in a balance. 
In England some impression may be made by the 
prices of cotton and tobacco — "cotton down at 
ten or eleven cents in Georgia; and the great 
mass of tobacco in the same situation." He has, 
however, no " very favorable expectations." But 
as to France he evidently is not without hope that 
she will be wise enough to see that " she ought 
at once to embrace the arrangement held out by 
Congress, the renewal of a non-intercourse with 



294 JAMES MADISON. 

Great Britain being the very species of resistance 
most analogous to her professed views." But he 
was clearly not sanguine. 

If that was his wish, however, it was gratified. 
Napoleon did take advantage of the act; but 
in such a way as to reverse the relative positions 
of the two nations by seizing for France and tak- 
ing from the United States the power or the will 
to dictate terms. The French minister, Cham- 
pagny, announced in a letter merely, in August, 
the revocation of the Berlin and Milan decrees, 
from the 1st of the following November; and, a 
day or two after, such new restrictions were im- 
posed upon American trade, by prohibitory duties 
and a navigation act, as pretty much to ruin what 
little there was left of it. The revocation of the 
edicts, moreover, was coupled with the conditions 
that Great Britain should not only recall her order 
in council, but renounce her "new principles of 
blockade," or that the United States should 
"cause their rights to be respected by the Eng- 
lish." Napoleon had in this three ends to gain, 
and he gained them all : First, to secure France 
against a renewal of the non-importation act of 
the United States, if the President should accept 
this conditional recall of the decrees as satisfac- 
tory ; second, to leave those decrees virtually un- 
repealed, by making their recall depend upon the 
action of England, who, he well knew, would not 
listen to the proposed conditions ; and, third, to 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 295 

involve the United States and England in new 
disputes, which might lead to war. Everything 
turned out as the Emperor wished. The Presi- 
dent accepted the conditional withdrawal of the 
French decrees, as in accordance with the act of 
Congress ; England refused to recognize a contin- 
gent withdrawal as a withdrawal at all ; and the 
result at length was war between England and 
the United States. 

The acquiescence of the President in the decis- 
ion of Napoleon was the more significant inasmuch 
as Mr. Smith, the Secretary of State, had assured 
the French government, when a copy of the act 
of May was sent to it, that there could be no ne- 
gotiation under the act until another matter was 
disposed of. A decree, issued at Rambouillet in 
March, 1810, and enforced in May, ordered the 
confiscation of all American ships then detained in 
the ports of France, and in Spanish, Dutch, and 
Neapolitan ports under the control pf France. 
The loss to American merchants, including ships 
and cargoes, was estimated to be about forty mil- 
lion dollars. This decree was ostensibly in retal- 
iation of that act of non-intercourse passed by 
Congress more than a year before, and was, there- 
fore, a retrospective law. The non - intercourse 
act, moreover, had expired by its own limitation 
months before many of these ships were seized ; 
but all, nevertheless, were confiscated, though some 
of them had entered the ports merely for shelter. 



296 JAMES MADISON. 

By order of the President, Smith wrote to Arm^ 
strong, the American minister at Paris, that " a 
satisfactory provision for restoring the property 
lately surprised and seized by the order, or at the 
instance of the French government, must be com- 
bined with a repeal of the French edicts, with a 
view to a non-intercourse with Great Britain ; 
such a provision being an indispensable evidence 
of the just purpose of France toward the United 
States." The injunction was repeated a few weeks 
later ; but when the Emperor's decision upon the 
decrees was announced, in August, the " indis- 
pensable" was dispensed with, and a few months 
later an absolute refusal of any compensation for 
the spoliation under the Rambouillet decree was 
quietly submitted to. 

But meanwhile the President, in November, is- 
sued a proclamation announcing that France had 
complied with the act of the previous May, and 
revoked the decrees, while the English orders in 
council remained unrepealed. But England still 
had three months, according to the act, in which 
to make her choice between a recall of her orders 
in council or the alternative of seeing the Amer- 
ican non-intercourse act revived against her. 
But, it is to be observed, the French minister's 
announcement of the acceptance of the act of 
May was not made till August, and then the revo- 
cation of the decrees was not to take effect till 
November. November came bringing with it the 



3fADIS0N AS PRESIDENT. 297 

President's proclamation, when it soon appeared 
that there was still to be " tarrying in the eating 
of the cake." The decrees were to remain in 
force at least three months longer, till it should be 
known whether Great Britain would comply with 
those terms which France — not the United States 
— made the condition of revoking the orders in 
council ; and if Great Britain did not comply, then 
the French decrees were not revoked. The legal- 
ity of the President's proclamation, of course, was 
questioned. There was, as Josiah Quincy said 
in debate in the House, the following February 
(1811), "a continued seizure of all the vessels 
which came within the grasp of the French cus- 
tom-house, from the 1st of November down to the 
date of our last accounts." Other members, not 
more earnest, were less temperate in the expres- 
sion of their indignation at what, one of them said, 
would be called swindling in the conduct of pri- 
vate affairs ; while another declared that the Pres- 
ident was throwing the people " into the embrace 
of that monster at whose perfidy Lucifer blushed 
and hell stands astonished." France knew all this 
while what England's decision would be. She was 
ready to rescind the orders in council when the 
French edicts were revoked, but she did not recog- 
nize a mere letter from the French minister, 
Champagny, to the American ambassador as such 
revocation. The second French condition, that 
England should abandon her " new principles of 



298 JAMES MADISON. 

blockade " and accept in their place a new French 
principle, was peremptorily rejected by the Eng- 
lish ministry. That proposition opened a question 
not properly belonging to an agreement touching 
the decrees and orders — a question of what was 
a blockade, and what could properly be subject to 
it. Napoleon's doctrine was, not only that a pa- 
per blockade was not permissible by the law of 
nations, but that there could be no right of block- 
ade '' to ports not fortified, to harbors and mouths 
of rivers, which, according to reason and the usage 
of civilized nations, is applicable only to strong or 
fortified places." Mr. Emott, a member of the 
House from New York, said in debate that the 
United States might well be grateful to both Eng- 
land and France, if they would agree upon this 
doctrine as good international law; since, in that 
case, as there were no fortified places in the United 
States, she would never be in peril of a blockade. 
But it was precisely what England would not ad-j 
mit nor even discuss as relevant to an agreemen 
to revoke the orders and decrees. 

To " this curious gallamatry," as Quincy called 
it, " of time present and time future, of doing and 
refraining to do, of declaration and understand- 
ing of English duties and American duties," was 
added another ingredient of Madison's own devis- 
ing. The American ministers in England and 
France were instructed that Great Britain would 
be expected to include in the revocation of her 



MADISON AS PRESIDENT. 299 

orders in council tlie blockade of a portion of 
the coast of France, declared in May, 1806 ; and 
the President offered, unasked, a pledge to the 
French Emperor, that this should be insisted upon. 
Whether he meant to make it easier for Napo- 
leon and harder for Great Britain to respond to 
the act of May, is a question impossible to answer ; 
but the opponents of the policy he was pursuing 
were careful to point out that the act of May 
said nothing whatever, either of this or any other 
blockade ; that when, the year before, the agree- 
ment was made with Erskine, the President did 
not pretend that the orders in council included 
blockades ; and that it was remarkable that he 
should forget his own declaration regarding the 
monstrous spoliation of a few months before by 
the French, under the Rambouillet decree, and yet 
remember this British order of blockade of four 
years before, which everybody else had forgotten. 
Indeed, so completely had it passed out of mind, 
that the American minister in London, Mr. Pink- 
ney, was obliged to ask the British Foreign Secre- 
tary whether that order had been revoked or was 
still considered as in force. It had never been for- 
mally withdrawn, was the answer, though it had 
been comprehended in the subsequent order in 
council of January, 1807. England refused, how- 
ever, to recall specifically this blockade of 1806, 
for that would have been construed as a recogni- 
tion of Napoleon's right to demand an abandon- 



800 JAMES MADISON. 

ment of her " new principles of blockade ; " but 
in fact — as the British minister in Washington 
afterward acknowledged — the recall of the order 
in council of 1807 would have annulled the order 
of blockade of 1806, which it had absorbed. 

The truth is, the whole negotiation was a trial 
of skill at diplomatic fence, in which England 
would not yield an inch to the United States or 
to France. Madison and his party were more than 
willing to aid Napoleon ; and Napoleon hoped to 
defeat both his antagonists by turning their swords 
against each other. A quite different result would 
have followed had France been as willing as Eng- 
land apparently was that the commercial edicts 
should be considered without regard to other 
questions ; or if the American Executive had in- 
sisted that it would accept their unconditional rev- 
ocation, pure and simple and not otherwise, from 
either power, as was contemplated in the act of 
May, 1810. But instead, when Congress rose in 
March, 1811, it left behind it an act renewing 
non-intercourse with England, in accordance with 
Napoleon's demand that the United States should 
" cause their rights to be respected by the Eng- 
lish." This meant war. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

WAR WITH ENGLAND. 

In May, 1811, there occurred one of those acci- 
dents which happen on purpose, and often serve 
as a relief when the public temper is in an exas- 
perated and almost dangerous condition. This 
was the fight between the American frigate Pres- 
ident, of forty-four guns, and the English sloop- 
of-war. Little Belt, of eighteen guns. This ves- 
sel belonged to the British squadron, which was 
ordered to the American coast to break up the 
trade from the United States to France ; and the 
President was one of the few ships the Govern- 
ment had for the protection of her commerce. 
The ships met a few miles south of Sandy Hook, 
chased each other in turn, then fired into each 
other without any reasonable pretext for the first 
shot, which each accused the other of having fired. 
The loss on board the English ship, in an en- 
counter which lasted only a few minutes, was over 
thirty in killed and wounded, while only a single 
man was slightly wounded on board the President. 
It was, as Mr. Madison said, an " occurrence not 
unlikely to bring on repetitions," and that these 



302 JAMES MADISON. 

would " probably end in an open rupture or a 
better understanding, as the calculations of the 
British government may prompt or dissuade from 
war." This certainly was obvious enough ; though 
it would be a great deal easier for England to 
bring on a war than to avert it, in the angry mood 
in which the majority of the Democratic party 
then was. But Mr. Madison preserved his equa- 
nimity. Considering his old proclivity for France, 
and his old dislike of England, his impartiality 
between them is rather remarkable. But his aim 
was still to keep the peace while he abated noth- 
ing of the well-founded complaints he had against 
both powers. When a new Congress assembled 
in the autumn he was careful to point out in his 
message the delinquencies of France as well as the 
offenses of England. He insisted that, while Eng- 
land should have acknowledged the Berlin and 
Milan decrees to be revoked and have acted ac- 
cordingly, France showed no disposition to repair 
the many wrongs she had inflicted upon American 
merchants, and had lately imposed such " rigorous 
and unexpected restrictions " upon commerce that 
it would be necessary, unless they were speedily 
discontinued, to meet them by " corresponding re- 
strictions on importations from France." 

This tone is even more pronounced in his let- 
ters for some following months. If anything, it 
is France rather than England that seems to be 
looked upon as the chief offender, with whom there 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 303 

was the greater danger of armed collision. A fort- 
nit^lit after Cona:ress had assembled he wrote to 
Barlow, the new minister to France, that though 
justified in assuming the French decrees to be so 
far withdrawn that a withdrawal of the British 
orders might be looked for, " yet the manner in 
which the French government has managed the 
repeal of the decrees and evaded a correction of 
other outrages, has mingled with the conciliatory 
tendency of the repeal as much of irritation and 
disgust as possible." " In fact," he adds, '' with- 
out a systematic change from an appearance of 
crafty contrivance and insatiate cupidity, for an 
open, manly, and upright dealing with a nation 
whose example demands it, it is impossible that 
good- will can exist; and that the ill-will which 
her policy aims at directing against her enemy 
should not, by her folly and iniquity, be drawn 
off against herself." French depredations upon 
American commerce in the Baltic were " kindling 
a fresh flame here," and, if they were not stopped, 
" hostile collisions will as readily take place with 
one nation as the other ; " nor would there be any 
hesitation in sending American frigates to that 
sea, " with orders to suppress by force the French 
and Danish depredations," were it not for the 
"• danger of rencounters with British ships of supe- 
rior force in that quarter." 

By this time, however. Congress, under the lead 
of younger, vigorous men — chief among them 



804 JAMES MADISON. 

Clay and Calhoun — panting for leadership and 
distinction, was beginning its clamor for war 
with England. How much respect had Madison 
for this movement, and how much faith in it ? 
A letter to Jefferson of February 7 answers both 
questions. Were he not evidently amused he 
would seem to be contemptuous. " To enable the 
Executive to step at once into Canada," he saj^s, 
"they have provided, after two months' delay, 
for a regular force requiring twelve to raise it, and 
after three months for a volunteer force, on terms 
not likely to raise it at all for that object. The 
mixture of good and bad, avowed and disguised 
motives, accounting for these things, is curious 
enough but not to be explained in the compass of 
a letter." This is not the tone of either hope or 
fear. If war was in his mind at that time, it was 
not war with England. Three weeks later, he 
writes to Barlow at Paris. On various points of 
negotiation between that minister and the French 
government, he observes much that " suggests dis- 
trust rather than expectation." He complains of 
delay, of vagueness, of neglect, of discourtesy, of 
a disregard of past obligations as to the liberation 
of ships and cargoes seized, and of late condemna- 
tions of ships captured in the Baltic ; and con- 
cerning all these and other grievances he says, 
" we find so little of explicit dealing or substantial 
redress mingled with the compliments and en- 
couragements which cost nothing because they 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 305 

mean nothing, that suspicions are unavoidable ; 
and, if they be erroneous, the fault does not lie 
with those who entertain them." France, he be- 
lieves, in asking for a new treaty, which he thinks 
quite unnecessary, is only seeking to gain time 
that it may take advantage of future events. 
The commercial relations between the two coun- 
tries are so intolerable, that trade " will be pro- 
hibited if no essential change take place." Unless 
there be indemnit}^ for the great wrongs committed 
under the Rambouillet decree, and for other spo- 
liations, he declares that " there can be neither 
cordiality nor confidence here ; nor any restraint 
from self-redress in any justifiable mode of effect- 
ing it." The letter concludes with the emphatic 
assertion that, if dispatches soon looked for " do not 
exhibit the French government in better colours 
than it has yet assumed, there will be but one 
sentiment in this country ; and I need not say 
what that will be." 

Congress all this while was lashing itself into 
fury against England. The ambitious young lead- 
ers of the Democratic party in the House were, so 
to speak, " spoiling for a fight," and they chose 
to have it out with England rather than with 
France. Not that there was not quite as mucli 
reason for resentment against France as against 
England. Some, indeed, of the more hot-headed 
were anxious for war with both ; but these were 
of the more impulsive kind, like Henry Clay, who 

20 



306 JAMES MADISON. 

laughed in scorn at the doubt that he could not at 
a blow subdue the Canadas with a few regiments 
of Kentucky militia. But war with England was 
determined upon, partly because the old enmity 
toward her made that intolerable which, to the 
old affection for France was a burden lightly 
borne ; and partly because the instinctive jealousy 
of the commercial interest, on the part of the 
planter-interest, preferred that policy which would 
do the most harm to the North. On April 1, 
1812, just five wrecks after the writing of this 
letter to Barlow, Mr. Madison sent to Congress a 
message of five lines, recommending the immedi- 
ate passage of an act to impose " a general em- 
bargo on all vessels now in port or hereafter arriv- 
ing for the period of sixty days." It was meant 
to be a secret measure ; but the intention leaked 
out in two or three places, and the news was hur- 
ried North by several of the Federalist members 
in time to enable some of their constituents to 
send their ships to sea before the act was passed. 
Nor, probabl}^, was it a surprise to anybody ; for 
war with England had been the topic of debate in 
one aspect or another all winter, and the purpose 
of the party in power was plain to everybody. 
That the embargo was intended as a preparation 
for war was frankly acknowledged. An act was 
speedily passed, though the period was extended 
from sixty to ninety days. Within less than sixty 
days, however, another message from the PreS' 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 307 

ident recommended a declaration of war. On 
June 3, the Committee on Foreign Relations, of 
which Calhoun was chairman, reported in favor of 
" an immediate appeal to arms," and the next day 
a declaratory act was passed. Of the seventy-nine 
affirmative votes in the House, forty-eight were 
from the South and West, and of the other thirty- 
one votes from the Northern States, fourteen were 
from Pennsylvania alone. Of the forty-nine votes 
against it, thirty-four were from the Northern 
States, including two from Pennsylvania. On the 
ITth, a fortnight later, the bill was got through 
the Senate by a majority of six. 

Mr. jNIadison for years had opposed a war with 
England as unwise and useless; unwise, because 
the United States was not in a condition to go to 
war with the greatest naval power in the world ; 
and useless, because the end to be reached by war 
could be gained more certainly, and at infinitely 
less cost by peaceful measures. The situation had 
not changed. Indeed, up to within a month of 
the message recommending an embargo as a pre- 
cursor of war, his letters show that, if he thouglit 
war was inevitable, it must be with France, not 
England. But the faction determined upon war 
must have at their command an administration to 
carry out that policy. Their choice was not lim- 
ited to Madison for an available candidate. Who- 
ever was nominated by the Democrats was sure to 
be chosen, and Madison had two formidable rivals 



308 JAMES MADISON. 

in James Monroe, Secretary of State, and De Witt 
Clinton, Mayor of New York, both eager for war. 
The choice depended on that question, and be- 
tween the embargo message of April 1, and the 
war message of June 1, the nomination was given 
to Madison by the congressional caucus. It was 
understood and openly asserted at the time by the 
opponents of the Administration, that the nomina- 
tion was the price of a change of policy. At the 
next session of Congress, before a year had passed 
away, Mr. Quincy said in the House : " The great 
mistake of all those who reasoned concerning the 
war and the invasion of Canada, and concluded 
that it was impossible that either should be seri- 
ously intended, resulted from this, that they never 
took into consideration the connection of both 
those events with the great election for the chief 
magistracy which was then pending. It was never 
sufficient!}^ considered by them that plunging into 
a war with Great Britain was among the condi- 
tions on which the support for the presidency was 
made dependent." The assertion, so plainly aimed 
at Madison, passed unchallenged, though the 
charge of any distinct bargain was vehemently de- 
nied. 

If Mr. Madison's conscience was not always 
vigorous enough to enable him to resist tempta- 
tion, it was so sensitive as to prompt him to look 
for excuses for yielding. In a sense this was to 
his credit as one of the better sort of politicians, 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 309 

without assuming it to be akin to that hypocrisy 
which is the homage vice pays to virtue. Per- 
haps it was this sentiment which led him to ac- 
cept so readily the pretended disclosures of John 
Henry, and to make the use of them he did. 
These were contained in twenty-four letters for 
which the President, apparently without hesita- 
tion, paid fifty thousand dollars. On March 9 
he sent them to Congress with a message, and on 
the same day, in a letter to Jefferson, alludes to 
them as '' this discovery, or rather formal proof 
of the cooperation between the Eastern Junto and 
the British cabinet." In the message he inti- 
mates that this secret agent was sent directly by 
the British government to Massachusetts to fo- 
ment disaffection, to intrigue " with the disaf- 
fected for the purpose of bringing about resistance 
to the laws and eventually, in concert with a Brit- 
ish force, of destroying the Union," and reannex- 
ing the Eastern States to England. In the war- 
message of June 1, these charges are repeated as 
among the reasons for an appeal to arms. Mr. 
Calhoun's committee followed this lead and im- 
proved upon it in the report recommending an 
immediate declaration of war. The Henry affair 
was declared an " act of still greater malignity " 
than any of the other outrages against the United 
States of which Great Britain had been guilty, 
and that which "excited the greatest horror." 
The incident was seized upon, apparently, to an- 



¥ 



310 JAMES MADISON. 

swer a temporary purpose, and then, so far as Mr. 
Madison was concerned, was permitted to sink 
into oblivion. In the hundreds of pages of his 
published letters, written in later life, in which 
he reviews and explains so many of the events of 
his public career, there is no allusion whatever to 
the Henry disclosures, which, in 1812, were held, 
with the ruin of American commerce and the im- 
pressment of thousands of American citizens, as 
an equally just cause for war. In truth there was 
nothing whatever in these disclosures, for which 
was paid an amount equal to the salary of half a 
presidential term, to warrant the assumptions of 
either Mr. Madison's messages or Mr. Calhoun's 
report. The man had been sent, at his own sug- 
gestion, early in 1809 by the Governor of Canada 
to Massachusetts to learn the state of affairs there 
and observe the drift of public opinion. His na- 
tional proclivity — he was an Irishman — to con- 
spiracy and revolution, had led him to see in the 
dissatisfaction with the embargo a determination 
in the New England people to destroy the Union, 
reannex themselves to England, and return to the \ 
flesh-pots of the colonial period. To learn how 
far gone they were in these designs, to put him- 
self in intimate relations with the leading conspir- 
ators and to brincr them into communication with 
Sir James Craig, the Governor General of Can- 
ada, that sufficient aid should come through him 
at the proper moment from the British govern- 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 811 

ment, was Henry's mission. Of this truly Irish 
plot Henry was the villain and Craig the fool ; 
but it is hardly possible that three years after- 
ward Madison and his friends, with all the letters 
spread before them, could really have been the 
dupes. 

Henry went to Boston and remained there 
about three months, living at a tavern. He found 
out nothing because there was nothing to be found 
out. He knew nobody, and nobody of any note 
knew him, and all the information he sent to 
Craig might have been, and doubtless was, picked 
up in the ordinary political gossip of the tavern 
bar-room, or culled from the columns of the news- 
papers of both parties. He compromised nobody, 
for — as Mr. Monroe as Secretary of State, tes- 
tified, in a report to the Senate — he named no 
person or persons in the United States, who had, 
*' in any way or manner whatever, entered into 
or countenanced the project or views " of himself 
and Craig ; and all he had to say was pointless 
and unimportant, except so far as his opinions 
might have some interest as those of a shrewd ob- 
server of public events. Indeed, his own conclu- 
sion was that there was no conspiracy in the East- 
ern States; that the Federal party was strong 
enough to keep the peace with England ; and 
that there was no talk of disunion nor any likeli- 
hood of it unless it should be brought about by 
war. The correspondence itself showed, in a let- 



312 JAiMES 31 AD IS ON. 

tei* from Robert Peel, then secretary to Lord 
Liverpool, that the letters of Henry were found, 
as a matter of course, among Canadian official pa- 
pers as they related to public affairs; but they 
bad either never attracted any attention or had 
been entirely forgotten, and Lord Liverpool was 
quite ignorant of any " arrangement or agree- 
ment " that had been made between the Governor 
of Canada and his emissary to New England. 
It was only because of his failure to get any re- 
ward from the British government or from Craig's 
successor in Canada, for what he was pleased to 
call his services, that the adventurer came to 
Washington in search of a market for himself and 
his papers. He came at an opportune moment. 
Notwithstanding the Secretary of State frankly 
declared that, neither by writing nor by word of 
mouth, did the man implicate by name anybody 
in the United States ; notwithstanding one of the 
letters was evidence, the more conclusive because 
incidental, that the British Secretary of State had 
known nothing of this mission contrived between 
Henry and Craig ; yet Mr. Madison pronounced 
the letters to be the " formal proof of the coopera- 
tion between the Eastern Junto and the British 
cabinet." The charge was monstrous, for this 
pretended proof had no existence. If the Presi- 
dent, however, could persuade himself that the 
story was true it would help him to justify him- 
self to himself for a change of policy, the result of 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 313 

which would be the coveted renomination for the 
presidency. 

Not that there had never been talk of disunion 
in New England. There had been in years past, 
as there was to be in years to come. But talk of 
that kind did not belong exclusively to that par- 
ticular period, nor was it confined to that particu- 
lar region of country. Ever since the adoption of 
the Constitution the one thing that orators. North 
and South, inside the halls of Congress and out- 
side them, were agreed upon was, that in all de- 
bate there was one argument, equally good on 
both sides, to which there could be no reply ; that 
in all legislation there was one possible supreme 
move that would bring all the wheels of govern- 
ment to a dead stop. The solemn warning or the 
angry threat was always in readiness for instant 
use, that the bonds of the Union, in one or an- 
other contingency, were to be rent asunder. But 
so frequent had been these warning cries of the 
coming wolf that they were listened to with in- 
difference, except when some positive act indi- 
cated real danger, as in the Jefferson- Madison 
" Resolutions of '98." It was easy, therefore, to 
alarm the public with confessions of a secret emis- 
sary, as he pretended, who had turned traitor to 
the government which had employed him and to 
the conspirators to whom he had been sent ; and 
the more reprehensible was it, therefore, in a 
President of the United States, to make the use 



814 JAMES MADISON. 

that was made of this story, which an impartial 
examination would have shown was essentially ab- 
surd and infamously false. Mr. Madison's intelli- 
gence is not to be impugned. He was too saga- 
cious, as well as too unimpassioned a man, to be 
taken in by the ingenious tale of such an adven- 
turer as Henry. In a letter to Colonel David 
Humphreys, written the next spring, in defense of 
the polic}^ of commercial restrictions, he says : " I 
have never allowed myself to believe that the 
Union was in danger, or that a dissolution of it 
could be desired, unless b}^ a few individuals, if 
such there be, in desperate situations or of un- 
bridled passions." New England, he continues, 
" would be the greatest loser by such an event, 
and not likely, therefore, deliberately to rush into 
it." "On what basis," he asks, "could New Eng- 
land and Old England form commercial stipula- 
tions?" Their commercial jealousy, he contends, 
forbade an alliance between them, for that was 
" the real source of our revolution." He closes 
with the significant assertion that, " if there be 
links of common interest between the two coun- 
tries, they would connect the Southern and not 
the Northern States with that part of Europe." 
How, then, could he seriously accept Henry's pre- 
tended disclosures as "formal proof," as he wrote 
to Jefferson at that time, " of the cooperation 
between the Eastern Junto and the British cabi- 
net ? " By the Eastern Junto is meant the Fed- 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 315 

eral party, or, at least, the influential and able 
leaders of that party ; and he could not consider, 
nor would he have spoken of them as " a few in- 
dividuals, if such there be, in desperate situations 
or of unbridled passions." He accepted, then, the 
Henry story in spite of his deliberate opinions, as 
a help to involve the country in a party war. 

Even at the risk of some prolixity it is need- 
ful to follow the course of events that led to this 
war a little farther ; for here was the culmina- 
tion of Mr. Madison's career, and from his course 
in shaping and directing these events we best 
learn what manner of man he was, and where his 
true place is among the public men of our ear- 
lier history. For a year and a half the United 
States had acted on the assumption that France 
had recalled her decrees, and that England had 
not revoked her orders. The extracts from Mr. 
Madison's letters, given on previous pages, show 
his conviction that the revocation of either de- 
crees or orders was practically no more true of one 
power than it was of the other. The government 
of the United States, nevertheless, submitted to 
the one, and against the other it first reenacted the 
non-intercourse act, then proclaimed an embargo 
preparatory to war, and finally declared war. Yet 
the whole world knew, and nobody so surely as 
the Emperor of France, that the Berlin and Milan 
decrees had never been formally repealed at all ; 
meanwhile French outrages upon American com- 



816 JAMES MADISON. 

merce had continued, and all redress so persist- 
ently refused, that so late as the last week hi Feb- 
ruary, 1812, the President intimated that war — 
war with France, not England — might prove the 
only remedy. But he suddenly yielded to the 
clamors of the war party at home, whatever may 
have been his motive. Then, and not till then, 
were the decrees actually revoked by Napoleon. 
In May, 1812, more than a month after the Presi- 
dent had recommended an embargo, the hostile 
purport of which was so well understood, a de- 
cree was proclaimed by the Emperor which for 
the first time really revoked those of Berlin and 
Milan. True, it was dated — "purported to be 
dated," it was said in an official English docu- 
ment — April, 1811. But that was of no mo- 
ment ; the essential point was, that it had never 
seen the light ; that any hint of its existence had 
never been given to the American goverimient or 
its representatives abroad, till the United States 
had taken measures to " cause their rights to be 
respected by the English," which was the original 
condition of a revocation of the decrees. Its os- 
tensible date was when the news reached France 
that non-intercourse had been again enforced 
against England in March, 1811 ; but its promul- 
gation was to all intents and purposes the real 
date, when news reached France, in April or 
May, 1812, that war againot England was finally 
determined upon. 



WAB WITH ENGLAND. 317 

The Duke of Bassano, the French minister, had 
not, moreover, brought out this year-okl decree 
without pressure from the American minister, 
Barlow. The President had Avritten Barlow in 
that February letter, already quoted, that if liis 
expected dispatches did not " exhibit the con- 
duct of the French government in better colours 
than it has yet assumed, there will be but one 
sentiment in this country, and I need not say 
what that will be." When the dispatches came 
Mr. Madison received no assurances of redress for 
past wrongs and no promises for the future ; but 
he learned, on the contrary, that Bassano, in a 
recent report to the Emperor, had referred to the 
decrees of Berlin and Milan as still in full force 
airainst all neutral nations which submitted to the 
seizure of their ships by the British, when con- 
taining contraband goods or enemy's property. 
Naturally the British ministry was not slow in 
presenting this precious acknowledgment to the 
United States as a proof that she had all along 
been in the wrong, and that in common justice to 
England the non-importation act should now be 
repealed. The assurance was at the same time 
repeated, possibly in a tone of considerable satis- 
faction, that when Napoleon really should revoke 
his decrees Great Britain was ready, as she al- 
ways had been, to follow his example with her 
orders. It was an awkward dilemma for the 
President and his minister to France. But by 



818 JAMES MADISON. 

this time, the Presidential nomination impending, 
Mr. Madison had made up his mind what to do. He 
was not exactly a wolf ; neither was Great Britain 
a lamb ; but the argument he used was the argu- 
ment of the fable. Instead of advising — Bassano 
having declared the decrees still in force — a re- 
peal of the non-importation act, as Great Britain 
claimed was in justice and comity her due, he rec- 
ommended a war measure. But Barlow evidently 
felt himself to be under some decent restraint of 
logic and consistency. He urged upon the French 
minister the necessity now of a positive and impe- 
rial declaration that the decrees, so far as regarded 
the United States, were absolutely revoked ; for 
this recent assertion of Bassano that they were still 
in force, put the United States in an attitude both 
towards France and England utterly and absurdly 
in the wrong. Barlow represented that, should the 
revocation be extended only to the United States, 
Great Britain would not for that alone repeal her 
orders. In that case France would lose nothing 
of the advantage of her present position, while 
everything would be lost should the United States 
be compelled to repeal her non-importation laws 
against England. Bassano was quick to see the 
necessity of jumping into the bramble-bush and 
scratching his eyes in again, and he then produced 
his year-old edict. Being a year old, it, of course, 
covered all questions. But was it a year old? 
Who knew? It had never been published? No, 



WAR WITH ENGLAND. 319 

the Duke said; but it had been shown to Mr. 
Jonathan Russell, who, at that time, was Charge 
d^ Affaires at Paris. Mr. Russell denied it, though 
a denial was hardly needed. He would not have 
ventured to withhold information so important 
from his government ; and it was evident, from the 
tone of his dispatches of a subsequent date, that 
he had no suspicion of its existence. For he had 
maintained it, as a point of "national honor," that 
the revocation of the French decrees must have 
preceded the President's proclamation of Novem- 
ber 1, 1810 ; and this he would not have dared to 
do had he known that the actual revocation by the 
French minister was not made till six montha 
after the date of the President's proclamation, and 
was then made secretly. 

However, as if to defeat all these machinations 
of France and the United States, Great Britain 
immediately recalled her orders in council, when, 
in May, 1812, the Duke of Bassano announced the 
edict of April, 1811, revoking the Berlin and Mi- 
lan decrees, though so far only as they concerned 
American vessels. The declaration of war of June 
18 had not reached England, and there was still 
a chance for peace. Foster, the late English min- 
ister to the United States, learned at Halifax — 
where he had stopped on his way home — that the 
orders in council were repealed, and he took im- 
mediate steps to bring about an armistice between 
the naval commanders on the coast of Nova Scotia, 



S20 JAMES MADISON. 

and between the Governor of Canada and tbo 
American general, Dearborn, in command of the 
frontier. The government at Washington, how- 
ever, refused to ratify any suspension of hostilities. 
Some negotiations followed, but, decrees and or- 
ders being out of the way, there was nothing left 
to negotiate about except the question of impress- 
ment. Upon that question the two governments 
were as wide apart as ever and not in the least 
likely to come together. Mr. Madison determined 
that on that ground alone the war should go on. 
It had been as good and sufficient ground for such 
a war any time for the past dozen years ; but 
whether it could be settled by an appeal to arms, 
was a question of possibilities and probabilities by 
which both Jefferson and Madison had hitherto 
been ruled. Was that still the essential question ? 
With the result came the answer. Two years 
later the Administration was glad to accept a 
treaty of peace in which impressment was not 
even alluded to. Great Britain did not relin- 
quish by a syllable her assumed right to board 
American ships in search of British seamen ; and 
the Administration instructed its Peace Commis^ 
sioners not even to ask that she should. 



CHAPTER XX. . 

CONCLUSION. 

Eaely in the war Mr. Madison said to a friend, 
in a letter " altogether private and written in con- 
fidence," that the way to make the conflict both 
" short and successful, would be to convince the 
enemy that he was to contend with the whole and 
not part of the nation." That it was a war of a 
party and not of the people, was a discouragement 
to himself, however the enemy may have regarded 
it, which he could never see any way of overcom- 
ing. He could not listen to an opponent nor learn 
anything from disaster. " If the war must con- 
tinue," said Webster within a year of its end, 
" go to the ocean. Let it no longer be said that 
not one ship of force, built by your hands since 
the war, yet floats. If you are seriously contend- 
ing for maritime rights go to the theatre where 
those rights can be defended. . . . There the 
united wishes and exertions of the nation will go 
with you. Even our party divisions, acrimonious 
as they are, cease at the water's edge. ... In 
protecting naval interests by naval means, you 

will arm yourself with the whole power of na- 
21 



322 JAMES MADISON. 

tional sentiment, and may command the whole 
abundance of national forces." Taking now in 
one view the events of those years, it is easy to 
see in our generation how mad were Madison and 
his party to turn deaf ears to such considerations 
as these. Their force and wisdom had already 
been proved by eighteen months of disaster on 
land, which had made the war daily more and 
more unpopular ; and by brilliant success for a 
time at sea, when each fresh victory was hailed 
with universal enthusiasm. " Our little naval tri- 
umphs," was the President's way of speaking of 
the latter ; and the only importance he seems to 
have seen in them was, that they excited some 
"rage and jealousy" in England and moved her 
to increase her naval force. Plow could Mr. Mad- 
ison expect that the whole and not a part only of 
the nation could uphold an administration which, 
after eighteen months of fighting, could be re- 
proached on the floor of Congress with not having 
launched a ship since the war was begun? Or 
did he only choose to remember that the navy, 
which alone so far had brought either success or 
honor to the national arms, was the creation of 
the Federalists in spite of the Jeff ersonian policy ? 
It surely would have been wiser to try to propi- 
tiate New England, with which he was in perpet- 
ual worry and conflict, by enlisting it in a nava] 
war in which it had some faith. A large propor- 
tion of her people would have been glad to escape 



CONCLUSION. 323 

idleness and poverty at home for service at sea, 
though they were rehictant to aid in a vain at- 
tempt to conquer Canada. 

Even to that purpose, however, Massachusetts 
contributed, in the second campaign of 1814, more 
recruits than any other single State ; and New 
England more than all the Southern States to- 
gether. New England could have given no 
stronger proof of her loyalty, if only Mr. Madison 
had known how to turn it to advantage. He was 
absolutely deaf and blind to it ; but his ears were 
quick to hear and his eyes to see, when he learned 
presently that the New Englanders were seriously 
calculating the value of the Union under such 
rule as they had had of late. It was not often 
that he relieved himself by intemperate language, 
but he could not help saying now, in writing to 
Governor Nicholas of Virginia, that " the greater 
part of the people in that quarter have been 
brought by their leaders, aided by their priests, 
under a delusion scarcely exceeded by that re- 
corded in the period of witchcraft ; and the lead- 
ers themselves are becoming daily more desperate 
in the use they make of it." The "delusion" 
was taking a practical direction. Mr. Madison 
had learned before the letter was written that a 
convention was about to meet at Hartford, the 
object of which was to weigh in a balance, upon 
the one side, the continuation of such government 
as that of the last two or three years, and, upon 



324 JAMES MADISON. 

the other side, the vahie of the Union. He ar- 
dently hoped that the commissioners, then assem- 
bled at Ghent, would agree upon a treaty ; and 
there seemed to be no good reason why there 
should not be peace when nothing was to be said 
of the cause of the war, no apology demanded for 
the past, and no stipulation for the future. But 
if by any chance the commissioners should fail, 
Mr. Madison saw in the Hartford Convention the 
huge shadow of a coming conflict more difficult 
to deal with than a foreign war. It was the first 
step in dead earnest for the formation of a North- 
ern Confederacy, and it is quite possible he may 
have felt that he was not the man for such a 
crisis. Every line of the letter pulsates with anx- 
iety. The only consoling thought in it is, that 
without "foreign cooperation revolt and separa- 
tion will hardly be risked," and to such coopera- 
tion he hoped a majority of the New England 
people would not consent. A treaty of peace, 
however, came to save him and the Union. Within 
a few weeks the administration papers were laugh- 
ing at Harrison Gray Otis of Boston, who had 
started for Washington as the representative of 
the Hartford Convention, but turned back at the 
news of peace ; and were advertising him as miss- 
ing under the name of Titus Gates. It was, how- 
ever, the hysterical laugh of recovery from a ter- 
rible fright. 

If ambition to be a second time President led 



I CONCLUSION. 325 

Mr. Madison to consent against his own better 
judgment to a war with England, he paid a heavy- 
penalty. It was the act of a party politician and 
not of a statesman ; for the country was no more 
prepared for a war in 1812, when as a politician 
he assented to it, than it had been for the pre- 
vious half dozen years when as a statesman he 
had opposed it. He gave the influence of the 
United States in support of a despotism that 
aimed at the subjugation of all Europe; he threw 
a fresh obstacle in the way of that power to which 
Europe could chiefly look to resist a common 
enemy ; and he did both under the pretense that 
the just complaints of the United States were 
greater against one of these powers than against 
the other. He declared war mainly to redress a 
wrong which ceased to exist before a blow was 
struck ; he then rejected an offer of peace because 
another wrong was still persisted in ; but finally, 
of his own motion, he accepted a treaty in which 
the assumed cause of war was not even alluded to. 
That Mr. Madison was not a good war-Presi- 
dent, either by training or by temperament, was, if 
it may be said of any man, his misfortune rather 
than his fault. But it was his fault rather than 
his misfortune that he permitted himself to be 
dragged in a day into a line of conduct which the 
sober judgment of years had disapproved. He is 
usually and most justly regarded as a man of 
great amiability of character ; of unquestionable 



k 



826 JAMES MADISON. 

integrity in all the purely personal relations of 
life ; of more than ordinary intellectual ability of 
a solid, though not brilliant, quality; and a dili- 
gent student of the science of government, tlie 
practice of which he made a profession. But he 
was better fitted by nature for a legislator than 
for executive office, and his fame would have been 
more spotless, though his position would have 
been less exalted, had his life been exclusively de- 
voted to that branch of government for which he 
was best fitted. It was not merely tlxit for the 
sake of the Presidency he plunged the country 
into an unnecessary war ; but when it was on his 
hands he neither knew what to do with it himself 
nor how to choose the right men who did know. 

It is our amiable weakness — if one may ven- 
ture to say so of the American people — that all 
our geese are swans, or rather eagles ; that we are 
apt to mistake notoriety for reputation ; that it is 
the popular belief of the larger number that he 
who, no matter how, has reached a distinguished 
position, is by virtue of that fact a great and good 
man. This is not less true, in a measure, of Mr. 
Madison than of some other men who have been 
Presidents, and of still more who have thought 
that they deserved to be. But, if that false esti- 
mate surrounds his name, there is a strong under- 
current of opinion, common among those whose 
business or whose pleasure it is to look beneath 
the surface of things historical, that he was want- 



CONCLUSION, 327 

ing in strength of character and in courage. He 
did not lack discernment as to what was wisest 
and best; but he was too easily influenced by 
others or led by the hope of gaining some glitter- 
ing prize which ambition coveted, to turn his back 
upon his own convictions. It was this weakness 
which swept him beyond his depth into troubled 
waters where his struggles were hopeless. Had 
he refused to assume the responsibility of a war 
which his judgment condemned, and which he 
should have known that he wanted the peculiar 
ability to bring to a successful and honorable con- 
clusion, he might never have been President, but 
his fame would have been of a higher order. 
History might have overlooked the act of politi- 
cal fickleness in his earlier career, which was so 
warmly resented by many of his contemporaries. 
Abandonment of party is too common and often 
too justifiable to be accounted as necessarily a 
crime ; and it can rarely be said with positiveness, 
whatever the probabilities, that a political de- 
serter is certainly moved by base motives. It is 
rather from ex post facto than from immediate ev- 
idence, as in Madison's case, that a just verdict is 
likely to be reached. But there can be neither 
doubt nor mistake as to the President's manage- 
ment of foreign affairs during the two years pre- 
ceding the declaration of war against England ; 
nor of the remarkable incompetence which he 
showed in rallying the moral and material forces 



i 



328 JAMES MADISON. 

of tbe nation to meet an emergency of his owil 
creation. 

Opposition to war generally and, therefore, op 
position to an arm 3^ and navy were sound cardina 
principles in the Jeffersonian school of politics. 
Mr. Madison was curiously blind to the logical 
consequences of this doctrine ; he could not see, 
or he would not consider, that, w^hen war seemed 
advisable to an administration, the result must de- 
pend mainly upon the success of the appeal to the 
people for their countenance and help. But he 
unwisely sought to raise and employ an army for 
the invasion and conquest of the territory of tbe 
enemy in spite of the opposition of a large propor- 
tion of the wealthiest and most intelligent people 
in the country ; while at the same time he refused 
to see any promise or any presage in a naval war- 
fare which had opened with unexpected brilliancy 
and would, had it been followed up, have been 
sure of popular support. His title to fame rests, 
with the multitude, upon the fact that he was one 
of the earlier Presidents of the Republic. But it 
is that period of his career which least entitles 
him to be remembered with gratitude and respect 
by his countrymen. 

Its crowning humiliation came with the capture 
of Washington in August, 1814, when the British 
admiral, Cockburn, entered the Hall of Represen- 
tatives, at the head of a band of followers, and 
springing into the speaker's chair shouted ; " Shall 



CONCLUSION. 329 

this harbor of Yankee Democracy be burned? 
All for it will say, Aye ! " Early in the war 
Madison had written to Jefferson, " we do not 
apprehend invasion by land " — the one thing, it 
would seem, that a commander-in-chief should 
have apprehended, whose single aim was the in- 
vasion and conquest of the enemy's territory. 
His devotion to this one purpose, to the exclusion 
of any other idea of either offense or defense and 
in spite of continued failure, was almost an in- 
fatuation. Within a year of that expression of 
confidence to Mr. Jefferson the whole coast was 
blockaded from the eastern end of Long Island 
Sound to the mouth of the jVIississippi. For a 
year before Washington was taken, the shores of 
Chesapeake Bay were harassed and raided and 
devastated by a blockading force, till the people 
were reduced almost to the condition of a con- 
quered country. Two months before the British 
commanders, Ross and Cockburn, went up the Po- 
tomac, Mr. Gallatin, who was then in London, 
had informed the President that the fleet was to 
be reinforced for that very purpose ; but neither 
he nor Congress took any effective measures to 
meet a danger so imminent. Their eyes were 
fixed with a far-off gaze across the Northern bor- 
der, while only five hundred regular troops, a 
body of untrained militia who had never heard 
the whistle of a bullet, and a few gunboats on the 
Potomac, guarded the national capital against a 



330 JAMES MADISON. 

British fleet, a thousand marines, and thirty-five 
hundred men from Wellington's best regiments. 
The President fleeing in one direction with the 
Secretary of AYar, the Secretary of State, and the 
general in command ; Mrs. Madison fleeing in 
another, with her reticule filled with silver spoons 
snatched up in haste as she left the White House ; ^ 
behind them all as they fled, the horizon red with 
the blaze of the largest navy yard in the country 
and of all the public buildings, but one, of the 
capital ; — these incidents are an amazing com- 
mentary on the early assertion that invasion was 
not to be apprehended. 

The end of this wretched war, which has been 
foolishly called the second war of independence, 

1 Paul Jennings, who was a slave and the body-servant of Mr. 
Madison, says in his Reminiscences: "It has often been stated 
in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White 
House, she cut out from tlie frame the large portrait of Wasliing- 
ton (now in one of the parlors there) and carried it off. This is 
totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have re- 
quired a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver 
in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few 
squares off, and were expected every moment. John Suse (a 
Frenchman, then doorkeeper, and still [1865] liviug), and Ma- 
graw, the President's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a 
wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as 
could hastily be got hold of. When the British did arrive, they 
ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines, etc., that I had pre- 
pared for the President's party." On a previous page he had re- 
lated that: "Mrs. Madison ordered dinner to be ready at three 
as usual ; I set the table myself, and brought up the ale, cider, 
and wine, and placed them in the coolers, as all the cabinet and 
several military gentlemen and strangers were expected." 



CONCLUSION. 331 

came four montlis afterward. Never was a peace 
so welcome as this was on all sides. England 
was exhausted with the long contest with Napo- 
leon ; and now, that being over, as there was no 
practical question to differ about with the United 
States, the ministry were not unwilling to listen 
to the demands of the commercial and manufac- 
turing classes. In America so great was the uni- 
versal joy that the Federalists and the Democrats 
forgot their differences and their hates, and wept 
and laughed by turns in each other's arms and 
kissed each other like women. One party was 
delivered from calamities for which, if continued 
much longer, there seemed only one desperate and 
dreaded remedy; the other was overjoyed to back 
out of a blunder which was the straight and broad 
road to national ruin. Of all men, Mr. Madison 
had the most reason to be glad for a safe deliver- 
ance from the consequences of his own want of 
foresight and want of firmness. Less than two 
years remained to him of his public career. In 
that brief period much was forgotten and more 
forgiven — as our national way is — in the prom- 
ise of a great prosperity to be speedily achieved 
in the released energies of a vigorous and indus- 
trious people. He had not again to choose be- 
tween differing factions of his own party, nor to 
carry out a policy against the will of a formidable 
opposition. To the Federalists hardly a name 
was left in the progress of events at home and 



332 JAMES MADISON. 

abroad; while all immediate vital questions of dit 
ference vanished, the party in power remained 
in almost undisputed ascendency. The most im- 
portant Democratic measures it then insisted upon 
were a national bank and a protective tariff. To 
the establishment of a bank Mr. Madison assented 
against his owai conviction that any provision 
could be found for it in the Constitution ; and a 
tariff, both for revenue and for the protection and 
encouragement of American industry, he agreed 
with his party was the true policy. 

For nearly twenty years after his retirement to 
Montpellier — a name which, witli rare exceptions, 
he always spelled correctly, and not in the Amer- 
ican way — it w^as his privilege to live a w\atchful 
observer of the prosperity of his country. If it 
ever occurred to him in his secret soul that at the 
period of his preeminence he had done anything 
to arrest that prosperity, he gave no sign. He 
loved rather to remember and sometimes to recall 
to others the part he had taken in the nurture of 
the young Republic in the feeble days of its in- 
fanc3^ Of his owai administration and the events 
of that time he had much less to say than of the 
true interpretation of the Constitution, of the 
intent of its framers, and the circumstances that 
influenced their deliberations. His voluminous 
correspondence shows the bent of his mind as a 
legislator and a student of fundamental law : and 
on that, rather than on his ability and success as 



CONCLUSION. 333 

the cliief magistrate of the nation, rests his true 
fame. 

These twenty years, though passed in retirement, 
were not years of leisure. " I have rarely," he 
wrote in 1827, " during the period of my public 
life, found my time less at my disposal than since I 
took my leave of it ; nor have I the consolation of 
finding, that as my "powers of application necessa- 
rily decline, the demands on them proportionally 
decrease." Much as he wrote upon questions of 
an earlier period, there were no topics of the cur- 
rent time that did not arouse his interest. Upon 
the subject of slavery he thought much and wrote 
much and always earnestly and humanely. How 
to get rid of it was a problem which he never 
solved to his own satisfaction. Though it was one 
he always longed to see through, it never occurred 
to him that the way to abolish slavery was — to 
abolish it. How kind he was as a master, Paul 
Jennings bears witness. " I never," he says, " saw 
him in a passion, and never knew him to strike 
a slave, though he had over a hundred; neither 
would he allow an overseer to do it." If they 
were in fault he rebuked them ; but, adds Jen- 
nings, he would " never mortify them by doing it 
before others." It will be remembered that on 
the first occasion of his being a candidate for 
public office he refused to follow the universal Vir- 
ginian habit of "treating" the electors. To the 
principle which governed him then he adhered 



334 JAMES MADISON. 

tbrough life, and Lis letters show the warm inter- 
est he always took in every phase of the temper- 
ance movement. " I don't think he drank a quart 
of brandy in his whole life," says Jennings. A 
single glass of wine was all he ever took at din- 
ner, and this he diluted with water, when, says 
the same witness, "he had hard drinkers at his 
table who had put away his choice madeira pretty 
freely." This will go for something, considering 
the times, with even the most zealous of the mod- 
ern supporters of that cause ; but they must be 
quite satisfied to know that " for the last fifteen 
years of his life he drank no wine at all." Consid- 
eration for his own health, always feeble, may 
have led him to this abstinence ; but it is rather 
remarkable that a man of his position should have 
held, fifty years ago, the advanced notions which 
he certainly did upon this question ; and that the 
doubt only of the possibility of enforcing laws for 
prohibiting the manufacture and sale of spirits 
seems to have withheld him from proposing them. 
Social as well as moral questions he discussed 
with evident interest and without passion or prej- 
udice. Aside from the party meaning of the term, 
he belonged to that school of democracy, now ex- 
tinct, which believed that the highest object of 
human exertion is to improve man's condition and 
to secure to each the rights which belong to all. 
He did not agree with Robert Owen as to meth- 
ods ; but neither did he reject his schemes as in- 



CONCLUSION. 335 

evitably absurd because they were new and untried. 
One would not gather from his correspondence 
with Frances Wright that this was the notorious 
Fanny Wright whom the world chose to consider, 
as its way is, a disreputable and probably wicked 
woman, inasmuch as she proposed some radical 
changes in its social relations, which she thought 
would be a gain. He gave much attention to 
popular education, and all the influence he could 
command was devoted, through all the later years 
of his life, to the establishment and well-being of 
the University of Virginia. Education, he main- 
tained, was the true foundation of civil liberty, and 
on it, therefore, rested the welfare and stability of 
the Republic. It is probable that he would have 
drawn a line at difference of color then, simply 
because of the difference of condition implied by 
color. But he made no such distinction in sex. 
Sixty-three years ago he saw his way quite clearly 
on a question which is a sore trial now to many 
timid souls. The capacity of " the female mind '* 
for the highest education cannot, he said, "be 
doubted, having been sufficiently illustrated by its 
works of genius, of erudition, and of science." The 
capacity, he assumed, carried with it the right. 
In short, he was ready always to consider fairly 
questions relating to the well-being of society 
which since his time have deeply agitated the 
country ; and he approached them all much in the 
spirit of the reformer who hopes to leave the world 



336 JAMES MADISON. 

a little better and happier because he has lived 
in it. 

" Mr. Madison, I think," says Paul Jennings, 
" was one of the best men that ever lived." This 
is the testimony of an intelligent man whose op- 
portunities of knowing the personal qualities of 
him of whom he was speaking were more intimate 
than those of any other person could be except 
Mrs. Madison. " He was guilty," says Hildreth, 
"of the greatest political wrong and crime which 
it is possible for the head of a nation to com- 
mit." One saw^ the private gentleman, always 
conscientious and considerate in his personal rela- 
tions to other men ; the other judged the public 
man, moved by ambition, entangled in party ties 
and supposed party obligations, his moral sense 
blinded by the necessities of political compromises 
to reach party ends. It is not impossible to strike 
a just balance between these opposing estimates, 
though one is that of a servant, the other that of 
a learned and judicious historian. 

Mr. Madison left a legacy of ''Advice to My 
Country," to be read after his death and to " be 
considered as issuing from the tomb, where truth 
alone can be respected, and the happiness of man 
alone consulted." It is the lesson of his life, as 
he wished his countrymen to understand it. " The 
advice," he said, " nearest to my heart and deepest 
in my convictions is, that the Union of the States 
be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy 



CONCL USION, 337 

to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box 
opened, and the disguised one as the serpent creep- 
ing with his deadly wiles into Paradise.' ' The 
thoughtful reader, as he turns to the first page of 
this volume to recall the date of Mr. Madison's 
death, will hardly fail to note how few the years 
were before these open and disguised enemies, 
against whom he warned his countrymen, were 
found only in that party which he had done so 
much, from the time of the adoption of the Consti- 
tution, to keep in power. 

22 



/ 



INDEX. 



Adams, jfonm, on presidential titles, 
129, 131 ; his administration, 240. 

Adams, J. Q., memoir of Madison, 1, 
2 ; opinion of Jefferson, 254. 

Alien and Sedition Laws, 240, 250. 

Ames, Fisher, on the slave-trade, 137 ; 
on site of Federal capital, 147 ; on 
a United States bank, 170 ; the ap- 
peals to the Constitution, 182, note ; 
opinion of Madison, 200. 

Annapolis, first convention at, 61 ; 
second convention at, 64, 88. 

Bank, United States, 170 ; speculation 
in stock of, 186. 

Barhary States, war with, 262. 

Barlow, Joel, minister to France, ap- 
peal to Duke of Bassano, 318. 

Barron, Commodore, of frigate Chesa- 
peake, 275. 

Bassano, Duke of, announces repeal 
of decrees, 317. 

Baj'onne, decree issued at, 281. 

Berlin decree issued, 277 ; informal 
repeal of, 316 ; final repeal of, 316. 

Breckenridge, offers resolutions in 
Kentucky legislature in 1799, 249. 

Bonaparte. See Napoleon. 

Butler, Peirce, proposes fugitive slave 
clause in Federal Constitution, 111. 

Calhoun, John C., in Congress, 804. 

Canning, George, repudiates Erskine's 
treaty, 284. 

Capital, site of the, discussed, 128, 
146 ; the bargain for, 149, 159. 

Champagny, French minister, infor- 
mal revocation of Berlin and Milan 
decrees, 294. 

Chesapeake, frigate, attacked by the 
Leopard, man-of-war, 275; proposed 
settlement of the case of, by Er- 
skine, 385. 

Clay, Henry, in Congress, 304 ; his 
proposal to take Canada, 305. 



Clinton, De Witt, a candidate for 
presidential nomination, 308. 

Cockburn, Admiral, in Washington, 
328. 

Commerce of the United States, 264 
et seq. 

Compromises of the Constitution, 98, 
110. 

Congress, meeting of the First, under 
the Federal Constitution, 128. 

Constitution, the, 112 ; adoption of, 
115 et seq. ; in New Hampshire 
and Virginia, 120. 

Constitutional Convention, 88 ; de- 
bates in the, 115 et seq. ; character 
of the, 112. 

Craig, Sir John, and John Henry, 310 
et seq. 

Curtis, George T., History of the Con- 
stitution, 98. 

Debt, public, the, 22, 29, 152 et seq. 

Dexter, Samuel, estimate of New Eng- 
land people, 217. 

Disunion, frequent threats of, 31, 313. 

Draper, Lyman C, correspondence 
with Madison, 4, 5, 6. 

Duties, See Tariff. 

Ellsworth, Oliver, Member of Con- 
gress, 31 ; on slavery, 106, 107. 
Embargo, the, 264 ; repealed, 286. 
Essex Junto, 312, 314. 

Federal Government, organization of 
the, under the Constitution, 128, 
143. 

Federalists, origin of the name of the, 
90. 

Federalist, The, writers of, 116. 

Floyd, Catherine, affianced to Madi- 
son, 43. 

France, payments to, 201 ; Revolu- 
tion in, 202 ; declares war against 
England, 203 ; influence of revolt 



340 



INDEX. 



Franklin, Benjamin, on slavery, 160 
Freneau Philip, 176 et seq. /^Wash- 
ington's opinion of 214 
Friends, petitions of' the' Society of 
for abolition of slaverv, 160 • de 
nounced in Congress, 166. ' 

Gallatin Albert, fears of effect of laws 
against aliens 243 : Secretary of 
the Treasury, 286 

Genet, G. C," received as minister 

Gerry, Elbridge, on slavery, 167 
Giles, W. B., attack on' IlamHton, 

Great Britain, non-observance of 

oni^pfoJ'a!^'*^""^"""*-' 
or snips of, 141 ; war with France, 

S Hi" 'ir''' ^'l*^ 220 ; trade 
w h lA ■ ^^?°^oe-Pinkney treaty 
with, 2,^; orders in council, 277 • 

sSes'sOT'"'' '^T""'^ "^y Unit d 
fetates 30< ; repeals orders in coun- 
cil, 319 ; peace, 1814, 331. 



Jennings, Paul, on the capture of 
^ ashington, 336. -ipiure oi 

Kentucky resolutions of 1798-99, 243 

Leopard, man-of-war fip-hf vcuu tu 

Chesapeake. 275 ' ^ ''^ *^° 
Li^v^'^r^^"''''" Expedition, 260. 

^'lh\^''^h '^loop-of-war, fight with 

the President, 301 
Livermore. Samuel, on slave-trade, 

Liverpool, Lord, ignorance of Henry, 

Louisiana, purchase of, 257. 



Hamilton, Alexander, in Congress 31 ■ 
on right of taxation, sffon basis 
of representation, 98 repo?? of as 
Secretary of State in 1790 151 dif 
ference with Madison, 170, 190 -at- 
tn^^ ^l *^« Republicans, 193 

Hartford Convention, 323 
Henry, John, 309 et sen ' 

fLS?i\-^''^-^-sr^^ 

^'27n75'288'!^ ''^°''°' ^^' ^^^' ^'^' 

Ja?Tni: ^- ^•.' ?""«^ niinister, 289 
Ja}, John, minister to Spain 3'> >u • 
negotiations on the MisS"ppf q'lSl 

GratiStairio'*^^ *-^*^ -^^ 

aom, 68, note ; on use of steam 74 • 

ReblnioT"-V.^?T/' '^ ' «" -^hays-s 
^eoeinon, /8 ; letter to Washing- 
ton on condition of affairs, 195 re- 
lations with Washington, 214; Ken 
tucky resolutions of 1798-99 246 • 
inauguration nf 9:;9 . • ' ' 

speech 9^9 T^, V ^2 ' ^"ansural 
^peecn 2o.i ; purchase of Louisiana 
|g ; rejects -Monroe-Pinkney trSy,' 
^'4 names his successor to the 
presidency, 283. ^ 



ancestrv 3 et setj.,- education, 10 
on religious libertv, 13 17 ' 6fi 
member of Committee of Safety 16 
of \irginia Constitutional ConVen- 
tion 16 ; of Assembly, 20 ; delegate 

Iffa ?s""l?l9 'oV K'H .^^ P"''^' 
aii.urs, i(by, 21; his fa thfuluess 

and industry, 24 ; his pay, 25 fn! 
structedon the right tj navt'at on 
?4 .*\^ -^\'.^•'''«•^'PPi, an.l on imposts, 
lb PO^"i'»on on public debt 36 
154; and on taxation, 38 : and on 
basis of representation 39 ; engageS 

Assembly, 4/ : on national and state 
vTZ""''\I'^'^ navigation of the 

Wnh UT "'"'' "^ commerce in 
Virginia, 58; proposes a national 
conyention, 59 ; position on treaty 
obligations, 65; his tastes and S^ 
les, li , on steam-power, 73- nre 
historic relics in Virginia 7^ -^cn 

lllu^'^r "°^°" "^ *^^ ^*^«* '«.' 7^ 
<y, ol4, o36 ; course on the Mis<5is. 

|PP1 question and National Conven. 
<<f \ ]irginia Assembly, 85- 
father of the Constitution,'" 88 •' 
on slave representation, 98; differ- 
!Cith''1o?'^*^^i^^«^*'^^"dthe 
q-^Q •' .u ' "° slavery, 109, 162 
ttn' W^' Constitutional Conven-' 

FederJ i4 '>" ?r' ^^^^f P^''^ ^° " The 
BtlfnSrf.i' r^ ^ ' delegate to Con- 
eti_tutionaI Convention of Virginia 

11/ ;deWarville-s sketch of S; 
122 ; candidate for First CongreS' 
124 • opposed by Patrick fif nn ' 
1^6 , on presidential title, 130 • on 
fre_e trade, 1.52: on the slavettrade 
i^' , difference with Hamilton, 174-' 
changes his party, 181 et seq. ; 'jo^i 



INDEX. 



341 



ney northward, 184 ; Hamilton's 
opinion of, 190 ; leads attack on 
Hamilton, 193 ; on neutralit}-, 206 ; 
interest in Genet, 208 ; his pity 
foi' AVashington, 212 ; disapproves 
Jay's treaty, 226; as leader in Con- 
gress, 232; marries Mrs. Todd, 233 ; 
value of his writings, 235, 333 ; his 
priyate life and habits, 236, 334 ; 
resolutions of "98, 244 et srq. ; Sec- 
retary of State, 252 ; elected Presi- 
dent, 283 ; proclamation repealing 
embargo, 286 : proclamation re- 
called, 288 ; letter to Pinkney, 293 ; 
pledge to Napoleon on blockade, 
299 ; attitude toward France and 
Great Britain, 302 ; letter to Jeffer- 
son on preparations for war, 304 ; 
to Barlow, 302, 317 ; complains of 
France, 305 ; proposes general em- 
bargo and war with England, 306 ; 
renominated for President, 308 ; 
purchases Henry's papers, 309 ; re- 
turns to Montpellier, 332 ; his char- 
acter, 324, 333 ; legacy to his coun- 
try, 336. 

Marblehead, patriotic fishermen of, 
290. 

Martin, Luther, fears of a monarchy, 
78 ; on the Constitutional Conven- 
tion, 92, 93 ; in the Virginia Con- 
vention, 119 ; opposes Madison, 126. 

Maryland, proposes meeting of com- 
missioners, 57, 60. 

Mason, George, on slavery, 106. 

Massachusetts, revolutionary services 
and public debt of, 158 ; in war of 
1812, 324. 

Merino sheep, 277. 

Mifflin, Warner, petitions Congress, 
169. 

Mis.<;isKippi, navigation of, 32, 80. 

Monroe, James, Minister to France, 
228 et seq. ; candidate for presiden- 
tial nomination, 308 ; testimony 
against Ilenr}', 311. 

Monroe-Pinkney ti'eaty rejected, 288. 

Morris, Gouvemeur, on Jefferson, 
254, 300. 

Morris, Robert, on slavery, 102, 104. 

Napoleon Bonaparte, his policy, defi- 
nition of blockade, 298. 

Nicholas, George, offers Kentucky 
Resolutions of "98, 243. 

Non-importation Act of 1810, 291 ; of 
1811, 300. 

Nullification, Madison's opinion of, 
246 ; Jefferson the father of, 249. 

Otis, Harri«nn Gray, advertised as 
missing, 324. 



Owen, Robert, corresponds with Mad- 
ison, 334. 

Paper money, 70. 

Parker, Jonathan, proposes duty on 
importation of slaves, 135. 

Patterson, William, on slavery, 99. 

Peel, Robert, on the Henry letters, 
312. 

Pinckney, C. C, on slavery, 102, 148 ; 
on the Union, 113 ; on Jefferson, 
254. 

Pinknev, William, minister to Eng- 
land, 272. 

Potomac Company, plan of, 57. 

Potomac, navigation of, 55. 

Pre-historic remains in Virginia, 74. 

Presidency, succession in the, 184. 

President^ title of the, 129. 

President, the frigate, battle of, with 
the Little Belt, 301. 

Quakers. See Friends. 

Quincy, Josiah, on the embargo, 280; 
on French outrages, 297 ; on foreign 
relations, 298 ; on Madison's nomi- 
nation and the war, 308. 

Rambouillet decree, 295. 

Randolph, John, on the embargo, 
270. 

Religious freedom, 13, 17, 66, 68. 

Representation in Congress, basis of, 
39, 42. 

Rhode Island, rejects impost law, 34 ; 
joins the Republican party, 253 ; 
returns to the Federalist party, 283. 

Rives, William C, biography of Mad- 
ison, 3, 9, 19 ; on Virginia planta- 
tion life, 50. 

Rumsey, J., application of steam- 
power, 73. 

Rutledge, John, on the slave - trade, 
106. 

Shays's Rebellion, 76. 
Sherman, Roger, on slaverj-, 107- 
Slavery, possible extinction of, in the 

eighteenth centurj', 41 ; influence 

of, in Virginia, 49 et seq.; in the 

Constitution, 95 ; debate on, in the 

Constitutional Convention 99 et seq.; 

petitions on, to Congress, 160. 
Slave-trade, domestic, 135 ; in Louis' 

iana, 261. 
Slave-trade, foreign, debate on duty 

upon, 136 ef .^ey.; abolition of, 140; 

policy of the government on, 153, 

note. 
Smith, Robert, Secretary of State, 

285 ; demands satisfaction of France, 

295. 



♦» 



842 



INDEX. 



Solomon, Hayne, a Jew, befriends 

Madison, 25. 
South Carolina, rerolutionary debt of, 

15o. 
Steam-power first used, 73. 

Tariff, proposed in First Congress, 
132 ; dreaded effect of, in New Eng- 
land, 133 ; and at the South, 134 ; 
on importation of slaves, 135 ; on 
foreign ships, 142. 

Taxation, 31, 34. 

Todd, Dolly, marries Madison, 233. 

Virginia, ratifies the Constitution of 
the United States, 120; religious 
freedom in, 13, 17, 66 ; on the Missis- 
sippi question, 33, 85 ; on imposts. 
34 ; public debt, 49 ; planters of, 49 : 
port bill passed, 53 ; proposed in- 
structions to her delegates in Con- 
gress, 59 ; delegates to Convention at 
Annapolis, 63; refuses compliance 



with treaty with Great Britain, 64 ; 
'' Gerrymandering " in, 125 ; reso- 
lutions of '98, 246. 

Warville de Brissot, sketch of Madi- 
ison, 122. 

Washington, city, proposed site of cap- 
ital, 146, 159 ; taken by the British, 

Washington, George, delegate to Con- 
stitutional Convention, 63 ; inaug- 
uration as first President, 123 ; the 
official title, 129; proclamation of 
neutrality, 206 ; Jefferson's and 
3Iadison"s attitude toward, 212 ; 
principles of his administration,' 
216 ; portrait of, saved, 330. 

Webster, Daniel, on the war with 
Great Britain, 321. 

Wilson, James, member of Congress 
31 ; on slavery, 100. 

Wright, Frances, corresponds with 
Madison, 325. 



( 



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ace E. Scudder, who is well known both as a student 
of American history and as a writer. 

The aim of the Editor will be to secure trustworthy 
and graphic narratives, v,'hich shall have substantial 
value as historical monographs and at the same time 
do full justice to the picturesque elements of the sub- 
jects. The volumes are uniform in size and general 
style with the series of " American Statesmen " and 
"American Men of Letters," and are furnished with 
maps, indexes, and such brief critical apparatus as 
add to the thoroughness of the work. 

Speaking of the series, the Bostoji jfotirnal saysr 
" It is clear that this series will occupy an entirely ne^ 
place in our historical literature. Written by compe- 
tent and aptly chosen authors, from fresh materials, 
in convenient form, and with a due regard to propor- 
tion and proper emphasis, they promise to supply 
most sati.sfQCtorily a positive want." 



NOW READY. 

Virginia, A History of the People. By John Esten 
Cooke, author of "The Virginia Comedians," 
"Life of Stonewall Jackson," "Life of General 
Robert E. Lee," etc. 

Oregon, The Struggle for Possession. By William 
Barrows, D. D. 

Maryland. By William Hand Browne, Associate 
of Johns Hopkins University. 

KentiicJzy. By Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, S. D., 
Professor of Palaeontology, Harvard University, re- 
cently Director of the Kentucky State Survey. 

Michigan. By Hon. T. M. Cooley, LL. D. 

Kansas. By Levei^ett W. Spring, Professor of Eng- 
lish Literature in the University of Kansas, 

California. By Josiah Royce, Instructor in Philoso- 
phy in Harvard University. 

New York. By Hon. Ellis H. Roberts. 2 vols. 

Connecticut, By Alexander Johnston, author of a 
" Handbook of American Politics," Professor of 
Jurisprudence and Political Economy in the Col- 
lege of New Jersey. 

Missouri. By Lucien Carr, M. A., Assistant Curator 
of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology. 

Indiana. A Redemption from Slavery. By J. P. Dunn, 
Jr., author of " Massacres of the Mountains." 

Ohio. First-Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787. By 
Hon. RuFUS King. {Nearly Ready.) 
IN PREPARATION. 

New y*rsey. By Austin Scott, Ph. D., Professor of 
History, etc., in Rutgers College. 

Fenitsylvania. By Hon. Wayne MacVeagh, late At= 
torney-General of the United States. 

Illinois. By E. G. Mason. 

Other volumes to be announced hereafter. Each 

volume, with Map, i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 



PRESS NOTICES. 



"VIRGINIA." 

Mr. Cooke has made a fascinating volume — one v/hich it will 
be very difficult to surpass either in method or interest. . . . True 
historic insight appears through all these pages, and an earnest 
desire to do all parties and religions perfect justice. The story 
of the settlement of Virginia is told in full. ... It is made as 
interesting as a romance. — The Critic (New York). 

No more acceptable writer could have been selected to tell the, 
story of Virginia's history. — Educational Journal of Virginia 
(Richmond, Va.). 

« OREGON." 

The long and interesting story of the struggle of five nations 
for the possession of Oregon is told in the graphic and reliable 
narrative of William Barrows. ... A more fascinating record 
has seldom been written. . . . Careful research and pictorial skill 
of narrative commend this book of antecedent history to all in- 
terested in the rapid march and wonderful development of our 
American civilization upon the Pacific coast. — Springfield R^- 
■publican. 

There is so much that is new and informing embodied in this 
little volume that we commend it with enthusiasm. It is written 
with great ability. — Magazine of American History (New York). 

" MARYLAND." 

With great care and labor he has sought out and studied origi- 
nal documents. By the aid of these he is able to give his work a 
value and interest that would have been impossible had he fol- 
lowed slavishly the commonly accepted authorities on his subject. 
His investigation in regard to toleration in ^Maryland is particu- 
larly noticeable. — New York Evening Post, 

A substantial contribution to the history of America. — Maga>- 
tine of American History. 

" KENTUCKY." 

Professor Shaler has made use of much valuable existing ma- 
terial, and by a patient, discriminating, and jiitl!cious choice has 
given us a complete and impartial record uf the various stages 



through which this State has passed from its first settlement to 
the present time. No one will read this story of the building of 
one of the great commonwealths of this Union without feelings of 
deep interest, and that the author has done his work well and im- 
partially will be the general verdict. — Christian at Work (Newj 
York). 

A capital example of what a short State history should be. -^\ 
Hartford Coiirant. 

" KANSAS." 

In all respects one of the very best of the series. . . . His work 
exhibits diligent research, discrimination in the selection of ma- 
terials, and skill in combining his chosen stuff into a narration 
that has unity, and order, and lucidity. It is an excellent presen- 
tation of the important aspects and vital principles of the Kansas 
struggle. — Hartford Coiirant. 

"MICHIGAN." 

An ably written and charmingly interesting volume. . . . For 
variety of incident, for transitions in experience, for importance 
of events, and for brilliancy and ability in the service of the lead- 
ing actors, the history of Michigan offers rare attractions; and 
the writer of it has brought to his task the most excellent gifts 
and powers as a vigorous, impartial, and thoroughly accomplished 
historian. — Christian Register (Boston). 

"CALIFORNIA." 

Mr. Royce has made an admirable study. He has established 
his view and fortified his position with a wealth of illustration 
from incident and reminiscence. The story is made altogether 
entertaining. ... Of the country and its productions, of pioneer 
life and character, of social and political questions, of business 
and industrial enterprises, he has given us full and intelligent ac- 
counts. — Boston Transcript. 

It is the most truthful and graphic description that has been 
written of this wonderful history which has from time to time 
been written in scraps and sketches. — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers, 
Boston and New York. 



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